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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment,
+Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+
+Author: Rafael Sabatini
+
+Release Date: March 5, 2009 [EBook #7949]
+Last Updated: August 25, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by J. C. Byers, and Abdulh Ameed Alhassan
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES
+
+
+By Rafael Sabatini
+
+
+
+
+
+To David Whitelaw
+
+My Dear David,
+
+Since the narratives collected here as well as in the preceding volume
+under the title of the Historical Nights Entertainment--narratives
+originally published in The Premier Magazine, which you so ably
+edit--owe their being to your suggestion, it is fitting that some
+acknowledgment of the fact should be made. To what is hardly less than
+a duty, allow me to add the pleasure of dedicating to you, in earnest of
+my friendship and esteem, not merely this volume, but the work of which
+this volume is the second.
+
+Sincerely yours,
+
+Rafael Sabatini
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+ Preface
+
+        I.   THE ABSOLUTION
+   II.   THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+   III.   THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+   IV.   THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+   V.   THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+   VI.   THE BARREN WOOING
+   VII.   SIR JUDAS
+   VIII.       HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+   IX.   THE PATH OF EXILE
+   X.   THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+   XI.   THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the Historical
+Nights Entertainment, issued in December of 1917, has encouraged me to
+prepare the second series here assembled.
+
+As in the case of the narratives that made up the first volume, I set
+out again with the same ambitious aim of adhering scrupulously in every
+instance to actual, recorded facts; and once again I find it desirable
+at the outset to reveal how far the achievement may have fallen short of
+the admitted aim.
+
+On the whole, I have to confess to having allowed myself perhaps a wider
+latitude, and to having taken greater liberties than was the case with
+the essays constituting the previous collection. This, however, applies,
+where applicable, to the parts rather than to the whole.
+
+The only entirely apocryphal narrative here included is the first--"The
+Absolution." This is one of those stories which, if resting upon no
+sufficient authority to compel its acceptance, will, nevertheless,
+resist all attempts at final refutation, having its roots at least
+in the soil of fact. It is given in the rather discredited Portuguese
+chronicles of Acenheiro, and finds place, more or less as related here,
+in Duarte Galvao's "Chronicle of Affonso Henriques," whence it was taken
+by the Portuguese historical writer, Alexandre Herculano, to be included
+in his "Lendas e Narrativas." If it is to be relegated to the Limbo of
+the ben trovato, at least I esteem it to afford us a precious glimpse
+of the naive spirit of the age in which it is set, and find in that my
+justification for including it.
+
+The next to require apology is "His Insolence of Buckingham," but
+only in so far as the incident of the diamond studs is concerned. The
+remainder of the narrative, the character of Buckingham, the details of
+his embassy to Paris, and the particulars of his audacious courtship of
+Anne of Austria, rest upon unassailable evidence. I would have omitted
+the very apocryphal incident of the studs, but that I considered it of
+peculiar interest as revealing the source of the main theme of one
+of the most famous historical romances ever written--"The Three
+Musketeers." I give the story as related by La Rochefoucauld in his
+"Memoirs," whence Alexandre Dumas culled it that he might turn it to
+such excellent romantic account. In La Rochefoucauld's narrative it is
+the painter Gerbier who, in a far less heroic manner, plays the part
+assigned by Dumas to d'Artagnan, and it is the Countess of Carlisle who
+carries out the political theft which Dumas attributes to Milady. For
+the rest, I do not invite you to attach undue credit to it, which is
+not, however, to say that I account it wholly false.
+
+In the case of "The Hermosa Fembra" I confess to having blended together
+into one single narrative two historical episodes closely connected in
+time and place. Susan's daughter was, in fact, herself the betrayer
+of her father, and it was in penitence for that unnatural act that
+she desired her skull to be exhibited as I describe. Into the story of
+Susan's daughter I have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who,
+like the Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover--in this case a
+youth of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment
+in circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the
+judaizing of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore word of it
+at once to Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in fact by an interval
+of three years, and the first afforded Ojeda a strong argument for the
+institution of the Holy Office in Seville. Between the two there are
+many points of contact, and each supplies what the other lacks to make
+an interesting narrative having for background the introduction of the
+Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely fictitious,
+and the introduction of Torquemada is quite arbitrary. Ojeda was the
+inquisitor who dealt with both cases. But if there I stray into fiction,
+at least I claim to have sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand
+Inquisitor as I know him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life
+and times.
+
+The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point of view
+of my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a historical
+mystery. The mystery lies, of course, in the man's identity. He has
+been held by some to have been the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otropiev, by
+others to have been a son of Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. I am not
+aware that the theory that he was both at one and the same time has ever
+been put forward, and whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I
+claim that no other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of
+his career or to shed light upon its mysteries.
+
+Undoubtedly I have allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation
+in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The Barren Wooing." But
+the theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the
+matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to
+be not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the
+only theory that will convincingly explain the events. Elizabeth, as
+I show, was widely believed to be an accessory to the murder of Amy
+Robsart. But in carefully following her words and actions at that
+critical time, as reported by de Quadra, my reading of the transaction
+is as given here. The most damning fact against Elizabeth was held to be
+her own statement to de Quadra on the eve of Lady Robert Dudley's murder
+to the effect that Lady Robert was "already dead, or very nearly
+so." This foreknowledge of the fate of that unfortunate lady has been
+accepted as positive evidence that the Queen was a party to the crime at
+Cumnor, which was to set her lover free to marry again. Far from that,
+however, I account it positive proof of Elizabeth's innocence of any
+such part in the deed. Elizabeth was far too crafty and clear-sighted
+not to realize how her words must incriminate her afterwards if she knew
+that the murder of Lady Robert was projected. She must have been merely
+repeating what Dudley himself had told her; and what he must have told
+her--and she believed--was that his wife was at the point of a natural
+death. Similarly, Dudley would not have told her this, unless his aim
+had been to procure his wife's removal by means which would admit of
+a natural interpretation. Difficulties encountered, much as I relate
+them--and for which there is abundant evidence--drove his too-zealous
+agents to rather desperate lengths, and thus brought suspicion, not only
+upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent Queen. The manner
+of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be far from what
+actually took place. The possibility of an accident--extraordinarily and
+suspiciously opportune for Dudley as it would have been--could not be
+altogether ruled out but for the further circumstance that Lady
+Robert had removed everybody from Cumnor on that day. To what can
+this point--unless we accept an altogether incredible chain of
+coincidence--but to some such plotting as I here suggest?
+
+In the remaining six essays in this volume the liberties taken with the
+absolute facts are so slight as to require no apology or comment.
+
+R. S.
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Detailed Contents
+
+
+  I. THE ABSOLUTION
+       Affonso Henriques, First King of Portugal
+  II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+       Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+  III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+       An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+  IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+       The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+  V. THE END OF THE VERT GALANT
+       The Assassination of Henry IV
+  VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+       The Murder of Amy Robsart
+  VII. SIR JUDAS
+       The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+  VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+       George Villiers' Courtship of Anne of Austria
+  IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+       The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+  X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+       Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+  XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+       Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+
+Aftonso Henriques, first King of Portugal
+
+In 1093 the Moors of the Almoravide dynasty, under the Caliph Yusuf,
+swept irresistibly upwards into the Iberian Peninsula, recapturing
+Lisbon and Santarem in the west, and pushing their conquest as far as
+the river Mondego.
+
+To meet this revival of Mohammedan power, Alfonso VI. Of Castile
+summoned the chivalry of Christendom to his aid. Among the knights who
+answered the call was Count Henry of Burgundy (grandson of Robert, first
+Duke of Burgundy) to whom Alfonso gave his natural daughter Theresa in
+marriage, together with the Counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the
+title of Count of Portugal.
+
+That is the first chapter of the history of Portugal.
+
+Count Henry fought hard to defend his southern frontiers from the
+incursion of the Moors until his death in 1114. Thereafter his widow
+Theresa became Regent of Portugal during the minority of their son,
+Affonso Henriques. A woman of great energy, resource and ambition, she
+successfully waged war against the Moors, and in other ways laid the
+foundations upon which her son was to build the Kingdom of Portugal. But
+her passionate infatuation for one of her knights--Don Fernando Peres de
+Trava--and the excessive honours she bestowed upon him, made enemies for
+her in the new state, and estranged her from her son.
+
+In 1127 Alfonso VII. of Castile invaded Portugal, compelling Theresa
+to recognize him as her suzerain. But Affonso Henriques, now aged
+seventeen--and declared by the citizens of the capital to be of age and
+competent to reign--incontinently refused to recognize the submission
+made by his mother, and in the following year assembled an army for the
+purpose of expelling her and her lover from the country. The warlike
+Theresa resisted until defeated in the battle of San Mamede and taken
+prisoner.
+
+He was little more than a boy, although four years were sped already
+since, as a mere lad of fourteen, he had kept vigil throughout the night
+over his arms in the Cathedral of Zamora, preparatory to receiving
+the honour of knighthood at the hands of his cousin, Alfonso VII. of
+Castile. Yet already he was looked upon as the very pattern of what a
+Christian knight should be, worthy son of the father who had devoted his
+life to doing battle against the Infidel, wheresoever he might be found.
+He was well-grown and tall, and of a bodily strength that is almost a
+byword to this day in that Portugal of which he was the real founder
+and first king. He was skilled beyond the common wont in all knightly
+exercises of arms and horsemanship, and equipped with far more
+learning--though much of it was ill-digested, as this story will serve
+to show--than the twelfth century considered useful or even proper in
+a knight. And he was at least true to his time in that he combined a
+fervid piety with a weakness of the flesh and an impetuous arrogance
+that was to bring him under the ban of greater excommunication at the
+very outset of his reign.
+
+It happened that his imprisonment of his mother was not at all pleasing
+in the sight of Rome. Dona Theresa had powerful friends, who so
+used their influence at the Vatican on her behalf that the Holy
+Father--conveniently ignoring the provocation she had given and the
+scandalous, unmotherly conduct of which she had been guilty--came to
+consider the behaviour of the Infante of Portugal as reprehensibly
+unfilial, and commanded him to deliver Dona Theresa at once from duress.
+
+This Papal order, backed by a threat of excommunication in the event of
+disobedience, was brought to the young prince by the Bishop of Coimbra,
+whom he counted among his friends.
+
+Affonso Henriques, ever impetuous and quick to anger, flushed scarlet
+when he heard that uncompromising message. His dark eyes smouldered as
+they considered the aged prelate.
+
+"You come here to bid me let loose again upon this land of Portugal that
+author of strife, to deliver over the people once more to the oppression
+of the Lord of Trava?" he asked. "And you tell me that unless by obeying
+this command I am false to the duty I owe this country, you will launch
+the curse of Rome against me? You tell me this?"
+
+The bishop, deeply stirred, torn between his duty to the Holy See and
+his affection for his prince, bowed his head and wrung his hands. "What
+choice have I?" he asked, on a quavering note.
+
+"I raised you from the dust." Thunder was rumbling in the prince's
+voice. "Myself I placed the episcopal ring upon your finger."
+
+"My lord, my lord! Could I forget? All that I have I owe to you--save
+only my soul, which I owe to God; my faith, which I owe to Christ; and
+my obedience, which I owe to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+The prince considered him in silence, mastering his passionate,
+impetuous nature. "Go," he growled at last.
+
+The prelate bowed his head, his eyes not daring to meet his prince's.
+
+"God keep you, lord," he almost sobbed, and so went out.
+
+But though stirred by his affection for the prince to whom he owed so
+much, though knowing in his inmost heart that Affonso Henriques was in
+the right, the Bishop of Coimbra did not swerve from his duty to Rome,
+which was as plain as it was unpalatable. Betimes next morning word was
+brought to Affonso Henriques in the Alcazar of Coimbra that a
+parchment was nailed to the door of the Cathedral, setting forth his
+excommunication, and that the Bishop--either out of fear or out of
+sorrow--had left the city, journeying northward towards Oporto.
+
+Affonso Henriques passed swiftly from incredulity to anger; then almost
+as swiftly came to a resolve, which was as mad and harebrained as could
+have been expected from a lad in his eighteenth year who held the reins
+of power. Yet by its very directness and its superb ignoring of all
+obstacles, legal and canonical, it was invested with a certain wild
+sanity.
+
+In full armour, a white cloak simply embroidered in gold at the edge
+and knotted at the shoulder, he rode to the Cathedral, attended by his
+half-brother Pedro Affonso, and two of his knights, Emigio Moniz and
+Sancho Nunes. There on the great iron-studded doors he found, as he had
+been warned, the Roman parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous
+Latin periods set forth in a fine round clerkly hand.
+
+He swung down from his great horse and clanked up the Cathedral steps,
+his attendants following. He had for witnesses no more than a few
+loiterers, who had paused at sight of their prince.
+
+The interdict had so far attracted no attention, for in the twelfth
+century the art of letters was a mystery to which there were few
+initiates.
+
+Affonso Henriques tore the sheepskin from its nails, and crumpled it
+in his hand; then he passed into the Cathedral, and thence came out
+presently into the cloisters. Overhead a bell was clanging by his
+orders, summoning the chapter.
+
+To the Infante, waiting there in the sun-drenched close, came presently
+the canons, austere, aloof, majestic in their unhurried progress through
+the fretted cloisters, with flowing garments and hands tucked into
+their wide sleeves before them. In a semi-circle they arrayed themselves
+before him, and waited impassively to learn his will. Overhead the bell
+had ceased.
+
+Affonso Henriques wasted no words.
+
+"I have summoned you," he announced, "to command that you proceed to the
+election of a bishop."
+
+A rustle stirred through the priestly throng. The canons looked askance
+at the prince and at one another. Then one of them spoke.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," he said gravely, and several instantly made chorus:
+"We have a bishop."
+
+The eyes of the young sovereign kindled. "You are wrong," he told them.
+"You had a bishop, but he is here no longer. He has deserted his see,
+after publishing this shameful thing." And he held aloft the crumpled
+interdict. "As I am a God-fearing, Christian knight, I will not live
+under this ban. Since the bishop who excommunicated me is gone, you will
+at once elect another in his place who shall absolve me."
+
+They stood before him, silent and impassive, in their priestly dignity,
+and in their assurance that the law was on their side.
+
+"Well?" the boy growled at them.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," droned a voice again.
+
+"Amen," boomed in chorus through the cloisters.
+
+"I tell you that your bishop is gone," he insisted, his voice quivering
+now with anger, "and I tell you that he shall not return, that he shall
+never set foot again within my city of Coimbra. Proceed you therefore at
+once to the election of his successor."
+
+"Lord," he was answered coldly by one of them, "no such election is
+possible or lawful."
+
+"Do you dare stand before my face, and tell me this?" he roared,
+infuriated by their cold resistance. He flung out an arm in a gesture
+of terrible dismissal. "Out of my sight, you proud and evil men! Back to
+your cells, to await my pleasure. Since in your arrogant, stiff-necked
+pride you refuse to do my will, you shall receive the bishop I shall
+myself select."
+
+He was so terrific in his rage that they dared not tell him that he had
+no power, prince though he might be, to make such an election, bowed to
+him, ever impassively, and with their hands still folded, unhurried as
+they had come, they now turned and filed past him in departure.
+
+He watched them with scowling brows and tightened lips, Moniz and Nunes
+silent behind him. Suddenly those dark, watchful eyes of his were held
+by the last figure of all in that austere procession--a tall, gaunt
+young man, whose copper-coloured skin and hawk-featured face proclaimed
+his Moorish blood. Instantly, maliciously, it flashed through the
+prince's boyish mind how he might make of this man an instrument to
+humble the pride of that insolent clergy. He raised his hand, and
+beckoned the cleric to him.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked him.
+
+"I am called Zuleyman, lord," he was answered, and the name
+confirmed--where, indeed, no confirmation was necessary--the fellow's
+Moorish origin.
+
+Affonso Henriques laughed. It would be an excellent jest to thrust upon
+these arrogant priests, who refused to appoint a bishop of their choice,
+a bishop who was little better than a blackamoor.
+
+"Don Zuleyman," said the prince, "I name you Bishop of Coimbra in the
+room of the rebel who has fled. You will prepare to celebrate High Mass
+this morning, and to pronounce my absolution."
+
+The Christianized Moor fell back a step, his face paling under its
+copper skin to a sickly grey. In the background, the hindmost members of
+the retreating clerical procession turned and stood at gaze, angered and
+scandalized by what they heard, which was indeed a thing beyond belief.
+
+"Ah no, my lord! Ah no!" Don Zuleyman was faltering. "Not that!"
+
+The prospect terrified him, and in his agitation he had recourse to
+Latin. "Domine, non sum dignus," he cried, and beat his breast.
+
+But the uncompromising Affonso Henriques gave him back Latin for Latin.
+
+"Dixi--I have spoken!" he answered sternly. "Do not fail me in
+obedience, on your life." And on that he clanked out again with his
+attendants, well-pleased with his morning's work.
+
+As he had disposed with boyish, almost irresponsible rashness, and in
+flagrant contravention of all canon law, so it fell out. Don Zuleyman,
+wearing the bishop's robes and the bishop's mitre, intoned the Kyrie
+Eleison before noon that day in the Cathedral of Coimbra, and pronounced
+the absolution of the Infante of Portugal, who knelt so submissively and
+devoutly before him.
+
+Affonso Henriques was very pleased with himself. He made a jest of the
+affair, and invited his intimates to laugh with him. But Emigio Moniz
+and the elder members of his council refused to laugh. They looked with
+awe upon a deed that went perilously near to sacrilege, and implored him
+to take their own sober view of the thing he had done.
+
+"By the bones of St. James!" he cried. "A prince is not to be
+brow-beaten by a priest."
+
+Such a view in the twelfth century was little short of revolutionary.
+The chapter of the Cathedral of Coimbra held the converse opinion that
+priests were not to be browbeaten by a prince, and set themselves to
+make Affonso Henriques realize this to his bitter cost. They dispatched
+to Rome an account of his unconscionable, high-handed, incredible
+sacrilege, and invited Rome to administer condign spiritual flagellation
+upon this errant child of Mother Church. Rome made haste to vindicate
+her authority, and dispatched a legate to the recalcitrant, audacious
+boy who ruled in Portugal. But the distance being considerable, and
+means of travel inadequate and slow, it was not until Don Zuleyman had
+presided in the See of Coimbra for a full two months that the Papal
+Legate made his appearance in Affonso Henriques' capital.
+
+A very splendid Prince of the Church was Cardinal Corrado, the envoy
+dispatched by Pope Honorius II., full armed with apostolic weapons to
+reduce the rebellious Infante of Portugal into proper subjection.
+
+His approach was heralded by the voice of rumour. Affonso Henriques
+heard of it without perturbation. His conscience at ease in the
+absolution which he had wrung from Mother Church after his own fashion,
+he was entirely absorbed in preparations for a campaign against the
+Moors which was to widen his dominions. Therefore when at length the
+thunderbolt descended, it fell--so far as he was concerned--from a sky
+entirely clear.
+
+It was towards dusk of a summer evening when the legate, in a litter
+slung in line between two mules, entered Coimbra. He was attended by two
+nephews, Giannino and Pierluigi da Corrado, both patricians of Rome,
+and a little knot of servants. Empanoplied in his sacred office, the
+cardinal had no need of the protection of men-at-arms upon a journey
+through god-fearing lands.
+
+He was borne straight to the old Moorish palace where the Infante
+resided, and came upon him there amid a numerous company in the great
+pillared hall. Against a background of battle trophies, livid weapons,
+implements of war, and suits of mail both Saracen and Christian, with
+which the bare walls were hung, moved a gaily-clad, courtly gathering of
+nobles and their women-folk, when the great cardinal, clad from head to
+foot in scarlet, entered unannounced.
+
+Laughter rippled into silence. A hush descended upon the company, which
+stood now at gaze, considering the imposing and unbidden guest. Slowly
+the legate, followed by the two Roman youths, advanced down the hall,
+the soft pad of his slippered feet and the rustle of his silken robes
+being at first the only sound. On he came, until he stood before the
+shallow dais, where in a massively carved chair sat the Infante of
+Portugal, mistrustfully observing him. Affonso Henriques scented here
+an enemy, an ally of his mother's, the bearer of a fresh declaration of
+hostilities. Therefore of deliberate purpose he kept his seat, as if to
+stress the fact that here he was the master.
+
+"Lord Cardinal," he greeted the legate, "be welcome to my land of
+Portugal."
+
+The cardinal bowed stiffly, resentful of this reception. In his long
+journey across the Spains, princes and nobles had flocked to kiss his
+hand, and bend the knee before him, seeking his blessing. Yet this
+mere boy, beardless save for a silky down about his firm young cheeks,
+retained his seat and greeted him with no more submissiveness than if he
+had been the envoy of some temporal prince.
+
+"I am the representative of our Holy Father," he announced, in a voice
+of stern reproof. "I am from Rome, with these my well-beloved nephews."
+
+"From Rome?" quoth Affonso Henriques. For all his length of limb and
+massive thews he could be impish upon occasion. He was impish now.
+"Although no good has ever yet come to me from Rome, you make me
+hopeful. His Holiness will have heard of the preparations I am making
+for a war against the Infidel that shall carry the Cross where now
+stands the Crescent, and sends me perhaps, a gift of gold or assist me
+in this holy work."
+
+The mockery of it stung the legate sharply. His sallow, ascetic face
+empurpled.
+
+"It is not gold I bring you," he answered, "but a lesson in the faith
+which you would seem to have forgotten. I am come to teach you your
+Christian duty, and to require of you immediate reparation of the
+sacrilegious wrongs you have done. The Holy Father demands of you the
+instant re-instatement of the Bishop of Coimbra, whom you have driven
+out with threats of violence, and the degradation of the cleric you
+blasphemously appointed Bishop in his stead."
+
+"And is that all?" quoth the boy, in a voice dangerously quiet.
+
+"No." Fearless in his sense of right, the legate towered before him.
+"It is demanded of you further that you instantly release the lady, your
+mother, from the unjust confinement in which you hold her."
+
+"That confinement is not unjust, as all here can witness," the Infante
+answered. "Rome may believe it, because lies have been carried to
+Rome. Dona Theresa's life was a scandal, her regency an injustice to my
+people. She and the infamous Lord of Trava lighted the torch of civil
+war in these dominions. Learn here the truth, and carry it to Rome. Thus
+shall you do worthy service."
+
+But the prelate was obstinate and proud.
+
+"That is not the answer that our Holy Father awaits."
+
+"It is the answer that I send."
+
+"Rash, rebellious youth, beware!" The cardinal's anger flamed up, and
+his voice swelled. "I come armed with spiritual weapons of destruction.
+Do not abuse the patience of Mother Church, or you shall feel the full
+weight of her wrath released against you."
+
+Exasperated, Affonso Henriques bounded to his feet, his face livid now
+with passion, his eyes ablaze.
+
+"Out! Away!" he cried. "Go, my lord, and go quickly, or as God watches
+us I will add here and now yet another sacrilege to those of which you
+accuse me."
+
+The prelate gathered his ample robes about him. If pale, he was entirely
+calm once more. With stern dignity, he bowed to the angry youth, and
+so departed, but with such outward impassivity that it would have been
+difficult to say with whom lay the victory. If Affonso Henriques thought
+that night that he had conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion.
+
+He was awakened early by a chamberlain at the urgent instances of Emigio
+Moniz, who was demanding immediate audience. Affonso Henriques sat up in
+bed, and bade him to be admitted.
+
+The elderly knight and faithful counsellor came in, treading heavily.
+His swarthy face was overcast, his mouth set in stern lines under its
+grizzled beard.
+
+"God keep you, lord," was his greeting, so lugubriously delivered as to
+sound like a pious, but rather hopeless, wish.
+
+"And you, Emigio," answered him the Infante. "You are early astir. What
+is the cause?"
+
+"I'll tidings, lord." He crossed the room, unlatched and flung wide a
+window. "Listen," he bade the prince.
+
+On the still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic
+hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques
+recognized it for the murmur of the multitude.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked, and thrust a sinewy leg from the bed.
+
+"It means that the Papal Legate has done all that he threatened, and
+something more. He has placed your city of Coimbra under a ban of
+excommunication. The churches are closed, and until the ban is lifted
+no priest will be found to baptize, marry, shrive or perform any other
+Sacrament of Holy Church. The people are stricken with terror, knowing
+that they share the curse with you. They are massing below at the gates
+of the alcazar, demanding to see you that they may implore you to lift
+from them the horror of this excommunication."
+
+Affonso Henriques had come to his feet by now, and he stood there
+staring at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart clutched
+by fear of these impalpable, blasting weapons that were being used
+against him.
+
+"My God!" he groaned, and asked: "What must I do?"
+
+Moniz was preternaturally grave. "It is of the first importance that the
+people should be pacified."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"There is one way only--by a promise that you will submit to the will
+of the Holy Father, and by penance seek absolution for yourself and your
+city."
+
+A red flush swept into the young cheeks that had been so pale.
+
+"What?" he cried, his voice a roar. "Release my mother, depose Zuleyman,
+recall that fugitive recreant who cursed me, and humble myself to seek
+pardon at the hands of this insolent Italian cleric? May my bones rot,
+may I roast for ever in hell-fire if I show myself such a craven! And
+do you counsel it, Emigio--do you really counsel that?" He was in a
+towering rage.
+
+"Listen to that voice," Emigio answered him, and waved a hand to the
+open window. "How else will you silence it?"
+
+Affonso Henriques sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his head in
+his hands. He was checkmated--and yet....
+
+He rose and beat his hands together, summoning chamberlain and pages to
+help him dress and arm.
+
+"Where is the legate lodged?" he asked Moniz.
+
+"He is gone," the knight answered him. "He left at cock-crow, taking the
+road to Spain along the Mondego--so I learnt from the watch at the River
+Gate."
+
+"How came they to open for him?"
+
+"His office, lord, is a key that opens all doors at any hour of day or
+night. They dared not detain or delay him."
+
+"Ha!" grunted the Infante. "We will go after him, then." And he made
+haste to complete his dressing. Then he buckled on his great sword, and
+they departed.
+
+In the courtyard of the alcazar, he summoned Sancho Nunes and a
+half-dozen men-at-arms to attend him, mounted a charger and with Emigio
+Moniz at his side and the others following, he rode out across the
+draw-bridge into the open space that was thronged with the clamant
+inhabitants of the stricken city.
+
+A great cry went up when he showed himself--a mighty appeal to him for
+mercy and the remission of the curse. Then silence fell, a silence that
+invited him to answer and give comfort.
+
+He reined in his horse, and standing in his stirrups very tall and
+virile, he addressed them.
+
+"People of Coimbra," he announced, "I go to obtain this city's
+absolution from the ban that has been laid upon it. I shall return
+before sunset. Till then do you keep the peace."
+
+The voice of the multitude was raised again, this time to hail him as
+the father and protector of the Portuguese, and to invoke the blessing
+of Heaven upon his handsome head.
+
+Riding between Moniz and Nunes, and followed by his glittering
+men-at-arms, he crossed the city and took the road along the river by
+which it was known that the legate had departed. All that morning
+they rode briskly amain, the Infante fasting, as he had risen, yet
+unconscious of hunger and of all else but the purpose that was consuming
+him. He rode in utter silence, his face set, his brows stern; and Moniz,
+watching him furtively the while, wondered what thoughts were stirring
+in that rash, impetuous young brain, and was afraid.
+
+Towards noon at last they overtook the legate's party. They espied his
+mule-litter at the door of an inn in a little village some ten miles
+beyond the foothills of the Bussaco range. The Infante reined up
+sharply, a hoarse, fierce cry escaping him, akin to that of some
+creature of the wild when it espies its prey.
+
+Moniz put forth a hand to seize his arm.
+
+"My lord, my lord," he cried, fearfully. "What is your purpose?"
+
+The prince looked him between the eyes, and his lips curled in a smile
+that was not altogether sweet.
+
+"I am going to beg Cardinal Corrado to have compassion on me," he
+answered, subtly mocking, and on that he swung down from his horse, and
+tossed the reins to a man-at-arms.
+
+Into the inn he clanked, Moniz and Nunes following closely. He thrust
+aside the vintner who, not knowing him, would have hindered him, great
+lord though he seemed, from disturbing the holy guest who was honouring
+the house. He strode on, and into the room where the Cardinal with his
+noble nephews sat at dinner.
+
+At sight of him, fearing violence, Giannino and Pierluigi came instantly
+to their feet, their hands upon their daggers. But Cardinal da Corrado
+sat unmoved. He looked up, a smile of ineffable gentleness upon his
+ascetic face.
+
+"I had hoped that you would come after me, my son," he said. "If you
+come a penitent, then has my prayer been heard."
+
+"A penitent!" cried Affonso Henriques. He laughed wickedly, and plucked
+his dagger from its sheath.
+
+Sancho Nunes, in terror, set a detaining hand upon his prince's arm.
+
+"My lord," he cried in a voice that shook, "you will not strike the
+Lord's anointed--that were to destroy yourself for ever."
+
+"A curse," said Affonso Henriques, "perishes with him that uttered it."
+He could reason loosely, you see, this hot-blooded, impetuous young
+cutter of Gordian knots. "And it imports above all else that the curse
+should be lifted from my city of Coimbra."
+
+"It shall be, my son, as soon as you show penitence and a Christian
+submission to the Holy Father's will," said the undaunted Cardinal.
+
+"God give me patience with you," Affonso Henriques answered him. "Listen
+to me now, lord Cardinal." And he leaned forward on his dagger, burying
+the point of it some inches into the deal table. "That you should punish
+me with the weapons of the Faith for the sins that you allege against me
+I can understand and suffer. There is reason in that, perhaps. But will
+you tell me what reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an
+offence which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?--and in punishing it
+by a curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are denied
+those true children of Mother Church, that no priestly office may be
+performed within the city, that men and women may not approach the
+altars of the Faith, that they must die unshriven with their sins upon
+them, and so be damned through all eternity? Where is the reason that
+urges this?"
+
+The cardinal's smile had changed from one of benignity to one of guile.
+
+"Why, I will answer you. Out of their terror they will be moved to
+revolt against you, unless you relieve them of the ban. Thus, Lord
+Prince, I hold you in check. You make submission or else you are
+destroyed."
+
+Affonso Henriques considered him a moment. "You answer me indeed,"
+said he, and then his voice swelled up in denunciation. "But this is
+statecraft, not religion. And when a prince has no statecraft to match
+that which is opposed to him, do you know what follows? He has recourse
+to force, Lord Cardinal. You compel me to it; upon your own head the
+consequences."
+
+The legate almost sneered. "What is the force of your poor lethal
+weapons compared with the spiritual power I wield? Do you threaten me
+with death? Do you think I fear it?" He rose in a surge of sudden wrath,
+and tore open his scarlet robe. "Strike here with your poniard. I
+wear no mail. Strike if you dare, and by the sacrilegious blow destroy
+yourself in this world and the next."
+
+The Infante considered him. Slowly he sheathed his dagger, smiling a
+little. Then he beat his hands together. His men-at-arms came in.
+
+"Seize me those two Roman whelps," he commanded, and pointed to Giannino
+and Pierlulgi. "Seize them, and make them fast. About it!"
+
+"Lord Prince!" cried the legate in a voice of appeal, wherein fear and
+anger trembled.
+
+It was the note of fear that heartened Affonso Henriques. "About it!"
+he cried again, though needlessly, for already his men-at-arms were
+at grips with the Cardinal's nephews. In a trice the kicking, biting,
+swearing pair were overpowered, deprived of arms, and pinioned. The men
+looked to their prince for further orders. In the background Moniz and
+Nunes witnessed all with troubled countenances, whilst the Cardinal,
+beyond the table, white to the lips, demanded in a quavering voice to
+know what violence was intended, implored the Infante to consider,
+and in the same breath threatened him with dread consequences of this
+affront.
+
+Affonso Henriques, unmoved, pointed through the window to a stalwart oak
+that stood before the inn.
+
+"Take them out there, and hang them unshriven," he commanded.
+
+The Cardinal swayed, and almost fell forward. He clutched the table,
+speechless with terror for those lads who were as the very apple of his
+eye, he who so fearlessly had bared his own breast to the steel.
+
+The two comely Italian youths were dragged out writhing in their
+captors' hands.
+
+At last the half-swooning legate found his voice. "Lord Prince," he
+gasped. "Lord Prince... you cannot do this infamy! You cannot! I warn
+you that... that..." The threat perished unuttered, slain by mounting
+terror. "Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as you hope for mercy!"
+
+"What mercy do you practice, you who preach a gospel of mercy in the
+world, and cry for mercy now?" the Infante asked him.
+
+"But this is an infamy! What harm have those poor children done? What
+concern is it of theirs that I have offended you in performing my sacred
+duty?"
+
+Swift into that opening flashed the home-thrust of the Infante's answer.
+
+"What harm have my people of Coimbra done? What concern is it of theirs
+that I have offended you? Yet to master me you did not hesitate to
+strike at them with the spiritual weapons that are yours. To master you
+I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that
+are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the
+things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my
+act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps
+your heart will be touched, your monstrous pride abated."
+
+Outside, under the tree, the figures of the men-at-arms were moving.
+Expeditiously, and with indifference, they went about the preparations
+for the task entrusted to them.
+
+The Cardinal writhed, and fought for breath. "Lord Prince, this must
+not be!" He stretched forth supplicating hands. "Lord Prince, you must
+release my nephews."
+
+"Lord Cardinal, you must absolve my people."
+
+"If... if you will first make submission. My duty... to the Holy See...
+Oh God! Will nothing move you?"
+
+"When they have been hanged you will understand, and out of your own
+affliction learn compassion." The Infante's voice was so cold, his
+mien so resolute that the legate despaired of conquering his purpose.
+Abruptly he capitulated, even as the halters went about the necks of his
+two cherished lads.
+
+"Stop!" he screamed. "Bid them stop! The curse shall be lifted."
+
+Affonso Henriques opened the window with a leisureliness which to the
+legate seemed to belong to the realm of nightmare.
+
+"Wait yet a moment," the Infante called to those outside, about whom by
+now a little knot of awe-stricken villagers had gathered. Then he
+turned again to Cardinal Corrado, who had sunk to his chair like a man
+exhausted, and sat now panting, his elbows on the table, his head in his
+hands. "Here," said the prince, "are the terms upon which you may have
+their lives: Complete absolution, and Apostolic benediction for my
+people and myself this very night, I on my side making submission to
+the Holy Father's will to the extent of releasing my mother from duress,
+with the condition that she leaves Portugal at once and does not return.
+As for the banished bishop and his successor, matters must remain as
+they are; but you can satisfy your conscience on that score by yourself
+confirming the appointment of Don Zuleyman. Come, my lord, I am being
+generous, I think. In the enlargement of my mother I afford you the
+means of satisfying Rome. If you have learnt your lesson from what I
+here proposed, your conscience should satisfy you of the rest."
+
+"Be it so," the Cardinal answered hoarsely. "I will return with you to
+Coimbra and do your will."
+
+Thereupon, without any tinge of mockery, but in completest sincerity
+in token that the feud between them was now completely healed, Affonso
+Henriques went down upon his knees, like the true and humble son of Holy
+Church he accounted himself, to ask a blessing at the Cardinal's hands.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+
+Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+
+The news of it first reached him whilst he sat at supper in the great
+hall of his palace in the Kremlin. It came at a time when already there
+was enough to distract his mind; for although the table before him was
+spread and equipped as became an emperor's, the gaunt spectre of famine
+stalked outside in the streets of Moscow, and men and women were so
+reduced by it that cannibalism was alleged to be breaking out amongst
+them.
+
+Alone, save for the ministering pages, sat Boris Godunov under the iron
+lamps that made of the table, with its white napery and vessels of
+gold and silver plate, an island of light in the gloom of that vast
+apartment. The air was fragrant with the scent of burning pine, for
+although the time of year was May, the nights were chill, and a great
+log-fire was blazing on the distant hearth. To him, as he sat there,
+came his trusted Basmanov with those tidings which startled him at
+first, seeming to herald that at last the sword of Nemesis was swung
+above his sinful head.
+
+Basmanov, a flush tinting the prominent cheek-bones of his sallow face,
+an excited glitter in his long eyes, began by ordering the pages out of
+earshot, then leaning forward quickly muttered forth his news.
+
+At the first words of it, the Tsar's knife clashed into his golden
+platter, and his short, powerful hands clutched the carved arms of
+his great gilded chair. Quickly he controlled himself, and then as he
+continued to listen he was moved to scorn, and a faint smile began to
+stir under his grizzled beard.
+
+A man had appeared in Poland--such was the burden of Basmanov's
+story--coming none knew exactly whence, who claimed to be Demetrius, the
+son of Ivan Vassielivitch, and lawful Tsar of Russia--Demetrius, who
+was believed to have died at Uglich ten years ago, and whose remains
+lay buried in Moscow, in the Church of St. Michael. This man had found
+shelter in Lithuania, in the house of Prince Wisniowiecki, and thither
+the nobles of Poland were now flocking to do him homage, acknowledging
+him the son of Ivan the Terrible. He was said to be the living image
+of the dead Tsar, save that he was swarthy and black-haired, like the
+dowager Tsarina, and there were two warts on his face, such as it was
+remembered had disfigured the countenance of the boy Demetrius.
+
+Thus Basmanov, adding that he had dispatched a messenger into Lithuania
+to obtain more precise confirmation of the story. That messenger--chosen
+in consequence of something else that Basmanov had been told--was
+Smirnoy Otrepiev.
+
+The Tsar Boris sat back in his chair, his eyes on the gem encrusted
+goblet, the stem of which his fingers were mechanically turning. There
+was now no vestige of the smile on his round white face. It had grown
+set and thoughtful.
+
+"Find Prince Shuiski," he said presently, "and send him to me here."
+
+Upon the tale the boyar had brought him he offered now no comment.
+
+"We will talk of this again, Basmanov," was all he said in
+acknowledgment that he had heard, and in dismissal.
+
+But when the boyar had gone, Boris Godunov heaved himself to his feet,
+and strode over to the fire, his great head sunk between his massive
+shoulders. He was a short, thick-set, bow-legged man, inclining to
+corpulence. He set a foot, shod in red leather reversed with ermine,
+upon an andiron, and, leaning an elbow on the carved overmantel, rested
+his brow against his hand. His eyes stared into the very heart of the
+fire, as if they beheld there the pageant of the past, upon which his
+mind was bent.
+
+Nineteen years were sped since Ivan the Terrible had passed away,
+leaving two sons, Feodor Ivanovitch, who had succeeded him, and the
+infant Demetrius. Feodor, a weakling who was almost imbecile, had
+married Irene, the daughter of Boris Godunov, whereby it had fallen out
+that Boris became the real ruler of Russia, the power behind the throne.
+But his insatiable ambition coveted still more. He must wear the crown
+as well as wield the sceptre; and this could not be until the Ruric
+dynasty which had ruled Russia for nearly seven centuries should be
+stamped out. Between himself and the throne stood his daughter's husband
+and their child, and the boy Demetrius, who had been dispatched with his
+mother, the dowager Tsarina, to Uglich. The three must be removed.
+
+Boris began with the last, and sought at first to drive him out of
+the succession without bloodshed. He attempted to have him pronounced
+illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of Ivan's seventh
+wife (the orthodox Church recognizing no wife as legitimate beyond the
+third). But in this he failed. The memory of the terrible Tsar, the
+fear of him, was still alive in superstitious Russia, and none dared to
+dishonour his son. So Boris had recourse to other and surer means. He
+dispatched his agents to Uglich, and presently there came thence a story
+that the boy, whilst playing with a knife, had been taken with a fit of
+epilepsy, and had fallen, running the blade into his throat. But it was
+not a story that could carry conviction to the Muscovites, since with it
+came the news that the town of Uglich had risen against the emissaries
+of Boris, charging them with the murder of the boy, and killing them out
+of hand.
+
+Terrible had been the vengeance which Boris had exacted. Of the luckless
+inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by his orders,
+and the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural Mountains, whilst
+the Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for having said that her boy was
+murdered at the instigation of Boris, was packed off to a convent, and
+had remained there ever since in close confinement.
+
+That had been in 1591. The next to go was Feodor's infant son, and
+lastly--in 1598--Feodor himself, succumbing to a mysterious illness, and
+leaving Boris a clear path to the throne. But he ascended it under the
+burden of his daughter's curse. Feodor's widow had boldly faced her
+father, boldly accused him of poisoning her husband to gratify his
+remorseless ambitions, and on a passionate appeal to God to let it be
+done by him as he had done by others she had departed to a convent,
+swearing never to set eyes upon him again.
+
+The thought of her was with him now, as he stood there looking into
+the heart of the fire; and perhaps it was the memory of her curse that
+turned his stout heart to water, and made him afraid where there could
+surely be no cause for fear. For five years now had he been Tsar of
+Russia, and in these five years he had taken such a grip of power as was
+not lightly to be loosened.
+
+Long he stood there, and there he was found by the magnificent Prince
+Shuiski, whom he had bidden Basmanov to summon.
+
+"You went to Uglich when the Tsarevitch Demetrius was slain," said
+Boris. His voice and mien were calm and normal. "Yourself you saw the
+body. There is no possibility that you could have been mistaken in it?"
+
+"Mistaken?" The boyar was taken aback by the question. He was a tall
+man, considerably younger than Boris, who was in his fiftieth year. His
+face was lean and saturnine, and there was something sinister in the
+dark, close-set eyes under a single, heavy line of eyebrow.
+
+Boris explained his question, telling him what he had learnt from
+Basmanov. Basil Shuiski laughed. The story was an absurd one. Demetrius
+was dead. Himself he had held the body in his arms, and no mistake was
+possible.
+
+Despite himself, a sigh of relief fluttered from the lips of Boris.
+Shuiski was right. It was an absurd story, this. There was nothing to
+fear. He had been a fool to have trembled for a moment.
+
+Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, he brooded more and more over
+all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that the nobility of
+Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki to do honour to this
+false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris found the chief cause of
+uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow, and empty bellies do not make
+for loyalty. Then, too, the Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had
+ruled too sternly, and had curbed their power. There were men like Basil
+Shuiski who knew too much--greedy, ambitious men, who might turn
+their knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to
+the pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a
+messenger to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he would
+yield up the person of this false Demetrius.
+
+But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin too
+late. The pretender had already left the place, and was safely lodged
+in the castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of Sandomir, to whose
+daughter Maryna he was betrothed. If these were ill tidings for Boris,
+there were worse to follow soon. Within a few months he learned from
+Sandomir that Demetrius had removed to Cracow, and that there he had
+been publicly acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of
+Ivan Vassielivitch, the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He
+heard, too, the story upon which this belief was founded. Demetrius had
+declared that one of the agents employed by Boris Godunov to procure
+his murder at Uglich had bribed his physician Simon to perform the deed.
+Simon had pretended to agree as the only means of saving him. He had
+dressed the son of a serf, who slightly resembled Demetrius, in garments
+similar to those worn by the young prince, and thereafter cut the lad's
+throat, leaving those who had found the body to presume it to be
+the prince's. Meanwhile, Demetrius himself had been concealed by the
+physician, and very shortly thereafter carried away from Uglich, to be
+placed in safety in a monastery, where he had been educated.
+
+Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the court
+of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich came forward
+now to identify with him the grown man, who carried in his face so
+strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That story which Boris now
+heard was soon heard by all Russia, and Boris realized that something
+must be done to refute it.
+
+But something more than assurances--his own assurances--were necessary
+if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last Boris bethought
+him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the murdered boy. He had her
+fetched to Moscow from her convent, and told her of this pretender who
+was setting up a claim to the throne of Russia, supported by the King of
+Poland.
+
+She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes and
+conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had
+done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these
+last twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost
+under her very eyes.
+
+"It is a circumstantial tale," she said. "It is perhaps true. It is
+probably true."
+
+"True!" He bounded from his seat. "True? What are you saying, woman?
+Yourself you saw the boy dead."
+
+"I did, and I know who killed him."
+
+"But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set the
+people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him."
+
+"Yes," she answered. And added the question: "What do you want of me
+now?"
+
+"What do I want?" He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated. Had
+the conventual confinement turned her head? "I want your testimony. I
+want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor that he is. The people
+will believe you."
+
+"You think they will?" Interest had kindled in her glance.
+
+"What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a mother
+know her own son?"
+
+"You forget. He was ten years of age then--a child. Now he is a grown
+man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be sure of
+anything?"
+
+He swore a full round oath at her. "Because you saw him dead."
+
+"Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of yours
+who killed him. Yet you made me swear--as the price of my brothers'
+lives--that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken than we thought.
+Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at all. Perhaps this man's
+tale is true."
+
+"Perhaps..." He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully, searchingly.
+"What do you mean?" he asked her sharply.
+
+Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that once had
+been so lovely. "I mean that if the devil came out of hell and called
+himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your undoing."
+
+Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon her
+wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His jaw dropped
+foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
+
+"The people will believe me, you say--they will believe that a mother
+should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation numbered."
+
+If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he was
+forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the weapon with
+which she could destroy him. The result of it was that she went back to
+her convent under close guard, and was thereafter confined with greater
+rigour than hitherto.
+
+Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining ground
+in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be sceptical, but
+Boris knew that he could not trust them, since they had no cause to love
+him. He began perhaps to realize that it is not good to rule by fear.
+
+And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he had
+been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation of the
+rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the pretender's real
+identity.
+
+The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none other
+than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a monk, but,
+unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had abandoned himself to
+licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy had been chosen by Basmanov
+for this particular mission.
+
+The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor in
+proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to Sigismund
+III. to proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to demand his expulsion
+from the Kingdom of Poland; and his denunciation was supported by a
+solemn excommunication pronounced by the Patriarch of Moscow against
+the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself
+Demetrius Ivanovitch.
+
+But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris expected.
+It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly, accomplished man,
+speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian, skilled in horsemanship
+and in the use of arms, and it was asked how an unfrocked monk had come
+by these accomplishments. Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had
+prevented the Tsarina Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives
+of revenge, he had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that,
+actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had prevented
+her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers Nagoy repaired
+to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their nephew, and to enrol
+themselves under his banner.
+
+Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The sword of
+Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out. Nothing remained
+him but to arm and go forth to meet the impostor, who was advancing upon
+Moscow with a great host of Poles and Cossacks.
+
+He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They, too,
+had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen him slain.
+Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was it possible that
+Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well as the Palatine of
+Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the adventurer, Prince Adam
+Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false Demetrius had first made his
+appearance, and all those Polish nobles who flocked to his banner? Or
+were they, too, moved by some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?
+
+That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time--in the winter
+of 1604--he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent them because,
+crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of leading them was denied
+him. He was forced to stay at home in the gloomy apartments of the
+Kremlin, fretted by care, with the ghosts of his evil past to keep him
+company, and assure him that the hour of judgment was at hand.
+
+With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to the
+adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he sent
+Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at Dobrinichi,
+and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which compelled him to fall back
+on Putioli. He lost all his infantry, and every Russian taken in arms on
+the pretender's side was remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.
+
+Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed and
+no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of the past
+gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then there was ever
+present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the pretender's identity. At
+last, one evening in April, he sent for Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him
+again concerning that nephew of his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It
+is not good to be the uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a
+great prince.
+
+Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white face
+was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had lost all its
+erstwhile firm vigour.
+
+"I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching this
+lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked monk, who
+claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that you have made no
+mistake--are you sure?"
+
+Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his mien.
+But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be mistaken. I am
+sure."
+
+Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His terrible
+eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the mental stage in
+which he mistrusted everything and everybody.
+
+"You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.
+
+"Highness, I swear..."
+
+"Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would Sigismund of
+Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you say? When I denounced
+him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev, would not Sigismund have
+verified the statement had it been true?"
+
+"The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius..." Otrepiev was
+beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.
+
+"Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after--long
+after--my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie. Will you
+stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until the rack pulls
+you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"
+
+"Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these years."
+
+"The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the whole
+truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your nephew."
+
+And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread. "He is
+not my nephew."
+
+"Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"
+
+Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon them
+before the irate Tsar.
+
+"I did not lie--not altogether. I told you a half-truth, Highness. His
+name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which he always has been
+known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I said, and the son of my
+brother's wife."
+
+"Then... then..." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he understood. "And his
+father?"
+
+"Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King Stephen's
+natural son."
+
+Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.
+
+"This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of course
+it is true. It is the light at last... at last. You may go."
+
+Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly. He
+could not know of how little account to Boris was the deception he had
+practiced in comparison with the truth he had now revealed, a truth
+that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon the dark mystery of the false
+Demetrius. The problem that so long had plagued the Tsar was solved at
+last.
+
+This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son of
+Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund of Poland
+and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the score of his
+identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading nobles of Poland,
+knew the man for what he was, and because of it supported him, using the
+fiction of his being Demetrius Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and
+facilitate the pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the
+object of it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and
+a Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already had
+sacrificed a throne--that of Sweden--to his devout conscience, and he
+saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not heard that a
+Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this Nuncio had been a stout
+supporter of the pretender's claim? What could be the Pope's concern in
+the Muscovite succession? Why should a Roman priest support the claim of
+a prince to the throne of a country devoted to the Greek faith?
+
+At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of this
+business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and Sigismund
+had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an elected King of
+Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious son of Stephen Bathory
+one who might perhaps supplant him on the Polish throne. To divert
+his ambition into another channel he had fathered--if he had not
+invented--this fiction that the pretender was the dead Demetrius.
+
+Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from the
+first, what months of annoyance might he not have been spared; how easy
+it might have been to prick this bubble of imposture. But better late
+than never. To-morrow he would publish the true facts, and all the world
+should know the truth; and it was a truth that must give pause to those
+fools in this superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek
+Church, who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
+being baited for them.
+
+There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign envoys,
+and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had been for many
+a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was now to do, by the
+conviction that he held the false Demetrius in the hollow of his hand.
+There to those envoys he would announce to-night what to-morrow he would
+announce to all Russia--tell them of the discovery he had made, and
+reveal to his subjects the peril in which they stood. Towards the close
+of the banquet he rose to address his guests, announcing that he had
+an important communication for them. In silence they waited for him to
+speak. And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into
+his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face empurpling
+until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his mouth and nostrils.
+
+He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel and
+wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting aside of
+earthly vanities, and then he expired.
+
+It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His death
+was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is nothing in the
+manner of it to justify the opinion that it resulted from anything other
+than an apoplexy.
+
+His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow to
+place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this lad of
+sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the army, being
+now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious Shuiski, went over
+at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him Tsar of Russia. Thereafter
+events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched on Moscow, entered it in triumph,
+and again proclaimed Demetrius, whereupon the people rose in revolt
+against the son of the usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled
+the boy and his mother.
+
+Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his life at
+the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the Muscovites that the
+boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not that of Demetrius, but of a
+peasant's son, who had been murdered in his stead.
+
+That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's path, and
+he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet before he occupied
+it, he showed the real principles that actuated him, proved how true had
+been Boris's conclusion. He ordered the arrest and degradation of the
+Patriarch who had denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place
+appointed Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to
+the Roman communion.
+
+On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his triumphal
+entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before the tomb of Ivan
+the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina Maria, who, after a brief
+communion with him in private, came forth publicly to acknowledge him as
+her son.
+
+Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she
+purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had been
+a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was her proper due. After
+all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in addition to
+restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the hated Boris
+Godunov.
+
+His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing
+adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia, with
+Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at first all went
+well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure of popularity. If his
+swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his bearing was so courtly and
+gracious that he won his way quickly to the hearts of his people. For
+the rest he was of a tall, graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a
+knightly address at arms.
+
+But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to serve
+two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the orthodox Russians
+whose tsar he was, and on the other there were the Poles, who had made
+him so at a price, and who now demanded payment. Because he saw that
+this payment would be difficult and fraught with peril to himself
+he would--after the common wont of princes who have attained their
+objects--have repudiated the debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or
+at least to evade, the persistent reminders that reached him from the
+Papal Nuncio, to whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of
+the Roman faith.
+
+But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different terms.
+The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had reached him that
+Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had taken refuge in England,
+adding that he might be tempted to restore the fugitive to the throne of
+Muscovy.
+
+The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused Demetrius
+to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken, which were
+precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a beginning he granted the
+Jesuits permission to build a church within the sacred walls of the
+Kremlin, whereby he gave great scandal. Soon followed other signs that
+he was not a true son of the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by
+his indifference to public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs,
+and by surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he
+conferred high offices and dignities.
+
+And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling against
+him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they had been
+swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat Shuiski,
+who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he expected,
+who resented, above all, to see Basmanov--who had ever been his
+rival--invested with a power second only to that of the Tsar himself.
+Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his underground, burrowing
+fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who in their turn wrought upon the
+populace, and presently all was seething disaffection under a surface
+apparently calm.
+
+The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter of
+the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow, the
+bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and the feasting
+that followed found little favour in the eyes of the Muscovites, who now
+beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.
+
+The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May, 1606.
+And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so skilfully laid.
+Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built before the walls
+of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had planned for the
+entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad that the fort was
+intended to serve as an engine of destruction, and that the martial
+spectacle was a pretence, the real object being that from the fort the
+Poles were to cast firebrands into the city, and then proceed to the
+slaughter of the inhabitants.
+
+No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated populace.
+They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May they stormed
+the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski himself, to the cry of
+"Death to the heretic! Death to the impostor!"
+
+They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the Tsar's
+bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword in hand to
+bar the way and give his master time to escape. The Tsar leapt from
+a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his leg, and lay there
+helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who presently discovered him.
+
+He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius
+Ivanovitch. Nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked monk.
+
+It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the hands of
+priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his
+doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of
+priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous
+sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one
+of them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if
+he had been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and
+tortured, and finally broken him so that he died.
+
+That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme of human
+things. And that part being played, the rest mattered little. In the
+nature of him and of his position it was impossible that his imposture
+should be other than ephemeral.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+
+An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+
+Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in those
+early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the previous
+October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de Torquemada,
+acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand and Isabella--had
+appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, ordering them to set up a
+Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to deal with the apostatizing said to
+be rampant among the New-Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so
+large a proportion of the population.
+
+Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
+of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
+circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that they
+should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos and never be
+found beyond them after nightfall, and that they should not practice as
+doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or innkeepers. The desire to emancipate
+themselves from these and other restrictions upon their commerce with
+Christians and from the generally intolerable conditions of bondage
+and ignominy imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and
+embrace Christianity.
+
+But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions of
+faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought. Bitter
+racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never extinguished by
+their conversion.
+
+Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal, sinister
+pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded inquisitors, with
+their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--headed by a Dominican
+bearing the white Cross, which invaded the city of Seville one day
+towards the end of December and took its way to the Convent of St. Paul,
+there to establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the
+New-Christians that they were to be the object of the attentions of this
+dread tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
+city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the Duke of
+Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos.
+
+This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed
+inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth
+that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons had
+departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical
+pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of Castile that within
+fifteen days they should make an exact return of the persons of both
+sexes who had sought refuge in their lordships or jurisdictions; that
+they arrest all these and lodge them in the prison of the Inquisition in
+Seville, confiscating their property, and holding it at the disposal
+of the inquisitors; that none should shelter any fugitive under pain
+of greater excommunication and of other penalties by law established
+against abettors of heretics.
+
+The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women merely
+because they had departed from Seville before departure was in any way
+forbidden, revealed the severity with which the inquisitors intended to
+proceed. It completed the consternation of the New-Christians who had
+remained behind, and how numerous these were may be gathered from the
+fact that in the district of Seville alone they numbered a hundred
+thousand, many of them occupying, thanks to the industry and talent
+characteristic of their race, positions of great eminence. It even
+disquieted the well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all
+his vain, empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known
+perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a lineage that
+went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian blood, untainted by
+any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid alleged to flow in Hebrew
+veins. But it happened that he was in love with the daughter of the
+millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl whose beauty was so extraordinary
+that she was known throughout Seville and for many a mile around as
+la Hermosa Fembra; and he knew that such commerce--licit or illicitly
+conducted--was disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the
+girl had been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy
+fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It had
+been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast himself
+the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de Susan; it was
+exasperating to discover now a new and more imperative reason for this
+odious secrecy.
+
+Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more aggrieved
+than that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped in his black
+cloak, he gained the Calle de Ataud on that January night.
+
+Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily escaladed
+balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella, the delight of her
+effaced all other considerations. Her father was from home, as she had
+told him in the note that summoned him; he was away at Palacios on some
+merchant's errand, and would not return until the morrow. The servants
+were all abed, and so Don Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and
+lounge at his ease upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon
+him with a Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in
+which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her bower, a
+long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and taste. The walls
+were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with costly Eastern rugs;
+on an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-beaked lamp of beaten copper
+charged with aromatic oil shed light and perfume through the apartment.
+
+Don Rodrigo sipped his wine, and his dark, hungry eyes followed her as
+she moved about him with vaguely voluptuous, almost feline grace. The
+wine, the heavy perfume of the lamp, and the beauty of her played
+havoc among them with his senses, so that he forgot for the moment his
+Castilian lineage and clean Christian blood, forgot that she derived
+from the accursed race of the Crucifiers. All that he remembered was
+that she was the loveliest woman in Seville, daughter to the wealthiest
+man, and in that hour of weakness he decided to convert into reality
+that which had hitherto been no more than an infamous presence. He would
+loyally fulfil the false, disloyal promises he had made. He would take
+her to wife. It was a sacrifice which her beauty and her wealth should
+make worth while. Upon that impulse he spoke now, abruptly:
+
+"Isabella, when will you marry me?"
+
+She stood before him, looking down into his weak, handsome face, her
+fingers interlacing his own. She merely smiled. The question did
+not greatly move her. Not knowing him for the scoundrel that he was,
+guessing nothing of the present perturbation of his senses, she found it
+very natural that he should ask her to appoint the day.
+
+"It is a question you must ask my father," she answered him.
+
+"I will," said he, "to-morrow, on his return." And he drew her down
+beside him.
+
+But that father was nearer than either of them dreamed. At that very
+moment the soft thud of the closing housedoor sounded through the house.
+It brought her sharply to her feet, and loose from his coiling arms,
+with quickened breath and blanching face. A moment she hung there,
+tense, then sped to the door of the room, set it ajar and listened.
+
+Up the stairs came the sound of footsteps and of muttering voices. It
+was her father, and others with him.
+
+With ever-mounting fear she turned to Don Rodrigo, and breathed the
+question: "If they should come here?"
+
+The Castilian stood where he had risen by the divan, his face paler
+now than its pale, aristocratic wont, his eyes reflecting the fear that
+glittered in her own. He had no delusion as to what action Diego de
+Susan would take upon discovering him. These Jewish dogs were quickly
+stirred to passion, and as jealous as their betters of the honour of
+their womenfolk. Already Don Rodrigo in imagination saw his clean red
+Christian blood bespattering that Hebrew floor, for he had no weapon
+save the heavy Toledo dagger at his girdle, and Diego de Susan was not
+alone.
+
+It was, he felt, a ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain. But his
+dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another moment she had
+bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the chamber's end, a tiny
+closet that was no better than a cupboard contrived for the storing of
+household linen. She had-moved with a swift precision which at another
+time might have provoked his admiration, snatching up his cloak and hat,
+and other evidences of his presence, quenching the lamp, and dragging
+him to that place of cramped concealment, which she remained to share
+with him.
+
+Came presently movements in the room beyond, and the voice of her
+father:
+
+"We shall be securest from intrusion here. It is my daughter's room.
+If you will give me leave, I will go down again to admit our other
+friends."
+
+Those other friends, as Don Rodrigo gathered, continued to arrive for
+the next half-hour, until in the end there must have been some twenty
+of them assembled in that chamber. The mutter of voices had steadily
+increased, but so confused that no more than odd words, affording no
+clue to the reason of this gathering, had reached the hidden couple.
+
+And then quite suddenly a silence fell, and on that silence beat the
+sharp, clear voice of Diego de Susan addressing them.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I have called you hither that we may concert
+measures for the protection of ourselves and all New-Christians in
+Seville from the fresh peril by which we are menaced. The edict of the
+inquisitors reveals how much we have to fear. You may gather from it
+that the court of the Holy Office is hardly likely to deal in justice,
+and that the most innocent may find himself at any moment exposed to
+its cruel mercies. Therefore it is for us now to consider how to protect
+ourselves and our property from the unscrupulous activities of this
+tribunal. You are the principal New Christian citizens of Seville;
+you are wealthy, not only in property, but also in the goodwill of the
+people, who trust and respect, and at need will follow, you. If nothing
+less will serve, we must have recourse to arms; and so that we
+are resolute and united, my friends, we shall prevail against the
+inquisitors."
+
+Within the alcove, Don Rodrigo felt his skin roughening with horror at
+this speech, which breathed sedition not only against the Sovereigns,
+but against the very Church. And with his horror was blent a certain
+increase of fear. If his situation had been perilous before, it was
+tenfold more dangerous now. Discovery, since he had overheard this
+treason, must mean his certain death. And Isabella, realizing the same
+to the exclusion of all else, clutched his arm and cowered against him
+in the dark.
+
+There was worse to follow. Susan's address was received with a murmur
+of applause, and then others spoke, and several were named, and their
+presence thus disclosed. There was the influential Manuel Sauli, who
+next to Susan was the wealthiest man in Seville; there was Torralba, the
+Governor of Triana; Juan Abolafio, the farmer of the royal customs, and
+his brother Fernandez, the licentiate, and there were others--all of
+them men of substance, some even holding office under the Crown. Not one
+was there who dissented from anything that Susan had said; rather did
+each contribute some spur to the general resolve. In the end it was
+concerted that each of those present should engage himself to raise a
+proportion of the men, arms and money that would be needed for their
+enterprise. And upon that the meeting was dissolved, and they departed.
+Susan himself went with them. He had work to do in the common cause, he
+announced, and he would do it that very night in which it was supposed
+that he was absent at Palacios.
+
+At last, when all had gone, and the house was still again, Isabella and
+her lover crept forth from their concealment, and in the light of the
+lamp which Susan had left burning each looked into the other's white,
+startled face. So shaken was Don Rodrigo with horror of what he had
+overheard, and with the terror of discovery, that it was with difficulty
+he kept his teeth from chattering.
+
+"Heaven protect us!" he gasped. "What Judaizing was this?"
+
+"Judaizing!" she echoed. It was the term applied to apostacy, to the
+relapse of New-Christians to Judaism, an offense to be expiated at the
+stake. "Here was no Judaizing. Are you mad, Rodrigo? You heard no single
+word that sinned against the Faith."
+
+"Did I not? I heard treason enough to."
+
+"No, nor treason either. You heard honourable, upright men considering
+measures of defence against oppression, injustice, and evil
+acquisitiveness masquerading in the holy garments of religion."
+
+He stared askance at her for a moment, then his full lips curled into a
+sneer. "Of course you would seek to justify them," he said. "You are of
+that foul brood yourself. But you cannot think to cozen me, who am of
+clean Old-christian blood and a true son of Mother Church. These men
+plot evil against the Holy Inquisition. Is that not Judaizing when it is
+done by Jews?"
+
+She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from her
+great dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult. Yet still she
+sought to reason with him.
+
+"They are not Jews--not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in holy
+orders. All of them are Christians, and..."
+
+"Newly-baptized!" he broke in, sneering viciously. "A defilement of that
+holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is revealed by what
+passed here just now. Jews they were born, the sons of Jews, and Jews
+they remain under their cloak of mock Christianity, to be damned as
+Jews in the end." He was panting now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal
+inflamed this profligate defiler. "God forgive me that ever I entered
+here. Yet I do believe that it was His will that I should come to
+overhear what is being plotted. Let me depart from hence."
+
+With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the door. Her
+clutch upon his arm arrested him.
+
+"Whither do you go?" she asked him sharply. He looked now into her eyes,
+and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw nothing of the
+hatred into which her love had been transmuted in that moment by his
+unsparing insults to herself, her race and her home, by the purpose
+which she clearly read in him.
+
+"Whither?" he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
+
+"Whither my Christian duty bids me."
+
+It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her purpose,
+she had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle, and armed with
+it stood between the door and him.
+
+"A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven watches
+us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must talk awhile
+before you go."
+
+Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine
+religious zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak woman's hand.
+Rapidly to-night was she coming into real knowledge of this Castilian
+gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for her lover. It was a
+knowledge that was to sear her presently with self-loathing and
+self-contempt. But for the moment her only consideration was that, as a
+direct result of her own wantonness, her father stood in mortal peril.
+If he should perish through the deletion of this creature, she would
+account herself his slayer.
+
+"You have not considered that the deletion you intend will destroy my
+father," she said quietly.
+
+"There is my Christian duty to consider," answered he, but without
+boldness now.
+
+"Perhaps. But there is something you must set against it. Have you no
+duty as a lover--no duty to me?"
+
+"No earthly duty can weigh against a spiritual obligation...."
+
+"Ah, wait! Have patience. You have not well considered, that is plain.
+In coming here in secret you wronged my father. You will not trouble to
+deny it.
+
+"Jointly we wronged him, you and I. Will you then take advantage of
+something learnt whilst you were hiding there like a thief from the
+consequences of what you did, and so do him yet this further wrong?"
+
+"Must I wrong my conscience?" he asked her sullenly.
+
+"Indeed, I fear you must."
+
+"Imperil my immortal soul?" He almost laughed.
+
+"You talk in vain."
+
+"But I have something more than words for you." With her left hand she
+drew upon the fine gold chain about her neck, and brought forth a tiny
+jewelled cross. Passing the chain over her head, she held it out.
+
+"Take this," she bade him. "Take it, I say. Now, with that sacred symbol
+in your hand, make solemn oath to divulge no word of what you have
+learnt here tonight, or else resign yourself to an unshriven death. For
+either you take that oath, or I rouse the servants and have you dealt
+with as one who has intruded here unbidden for an evil end." She backed
+away from him as she spoke, and threw wide the door. Then, confronting
+him from the threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder
+than a whisper. "Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with all
+your sins upon you, and so destroy for all eternity the immortal soul
+that urges you to this betrayal, or will you take the oath that I
+require?"
+
+He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she cut
+him short. "For the last time!" she bade him. "Will you decide?"
+
+He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
+conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the words
+of the formidable oath that she administered, an oath which it must damn
+his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because she imagined that
+she had taken the measure of his faith, she returned him his dagger,
+and let him go at last. She imagined that she had bound him fast in
+irrefragable spiritual bonds.
+
+And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had been
+present at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by order of the
+Holy Office of the Inquisition, she still clung to that belief. Yet
+presently a doubt crept in, a doubt that she must at all costs resolve.
+And so presently she called for her litter, and had herself carried to
+the Convent of St. Paul, where she asked to see Frey Alonso de Ojeda,
+the Prior of the Dominicans of Seville.
+
+She was left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded
+by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and
+a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging
+upon one of its whitewashed walls.
+
+Thither came presently two Dominican friars. One of these was a
+harsh-featured man of middle height and square build, the uncompromising
+zealot Ojeda. The other was tall and lean, stooping slightly at the
+shoulders, haggard and pale of countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark
+eyes, and a tender, wistful mouth. This was the Queen's confessor, Frey
+Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her,
+leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her with
+eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
+
+"You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan," he said,
+in a gentle voice. "God help and strengthen you, my child, against the
+trials that may be in store for you. What do you seek at our poor hands?
+Speak, child, without fear."
+
+"Father," she faltered, "I come to implore your pity."
+
+"No need to implore it, child. Should I withhold pity who stand myself
+in need of pity, being a sinner--as are we all."
+
+"It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy."
+
+"So I supposed." A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the tender
+melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. "If your father is
+innocent of what has been alleged against him, the benign tribunal of
+the Holy Office will bring his innocence to light, and rejoice therein;
+if he is guilty, if he has strayed--as we may all stray unless fortified
+by heavenly grace--he shall be given the means of expiation, that his
+salvation may be assured him."
+
+She shivered at the words. She knew the mercy in which the inquisitors
+dealt, a mercy so spiritual that it took no account of the temporal
+agonies inflicted to ensure it.
+
+"My father is innocent of any sin against the Faith," said she.
+
+"Are you so sure?" croaked the harsh voice of Ojeda, breaking in.
+"Consider well. Remember that your duty as a Christian is above your
+duty as a daughter."
+
+Almost had she bluntly demanded the name of her father's accuser, that
+thus she might reach the object of her visit. Betimes she checked the
+rash impulse, perceiving that subtlety was here required; that a direct
+question would close the door to all information. Skilfully, then, she
+chose her line of attack.
+
+"I am sure," she exclaimed, "that he is a more fervent and pious
+Christian--New-Christian though he be--than his accuser."
+
+The wistfulness faded from Torquemada's eyes. They grew keen, as became
+the eyes of an inquisitor, the eyes of a sleuth, quick to fasten on a
+spoor. But he shook his head.
+
+Ojeda advanced. "That I cannot believe," said he. "The deletion was
+made from a sense of duty so pure that the delator did not hesitate to
+confess the sin of his own commission through which he had discovered
+the treachery of Don Diego and his associates."
+
+She could have cried out in anguish at this answer to her unspoken
+question. Yet she controlled herself, and that no single doubt should
+linger, she thrust boldly home.
+
+"He confessed it?" she cried, seemingly aghast. The friar slowly nodded.
+"Don Rodrigo confessed?" she insisted, as will the incredulous.
+
+Abruptly the friar nodded again; and as abruptly checked, recollecting
+himself.
+
+"Don Rodrigo?" he echoed, and asked: "Who mentioned Don Rodrigo?"
+
+But it was too late. His assenting nod had betrayed the truth, had
+confirmed her worst fear. She swayed a little; the room swam round
+her, she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation against that
+forsworn betrayer surged to revive her. If it was through her weakness
+and undutifulness that her father had been destroyed, through her
+strength should he be avenged, though in doing so she pulled down and
+destroyed herself.
+
+"And he confessed to his own sin?" she was repeating slowly, ever on
+that musing, incredulous note. "He dared confess himself a Judaizer?"
+
+"A Judaizer!" Sheer horror now overspread the friar's grim countenance.
+"A Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!"
+
+"But I thought you said he had confessed."
+
+"Why, yes, but... but not to that." Her pale lips smiled, sadly
+contemptuous.
+
+"I see. He set limits of prudence upon his confession. He left out
+his Judatting practices. He did not tell you, for instance, that this
+deletion was an act of revenge against me who refused to marry him,
+having discovered his unfaith, and fearing its consequences in this
+world and the next."
+
+Ojeda stared at her in sheer, incredulous amazement.
+
+And then Torquemada spoke: "Do you say that Don Rodrigo de Cardona is a
+Judaizer? Oh, it is unbelievable."
+
+"Yet I could give you evidence that should convince you."
+
+"Then so you shall. It is your sacred duty, lest you become an abettor
+of heresy, and yourself liable to the extreme penalty."
+
+It would be a half-hour later, perhaps, when she quitted the Convent
+of St. Paul to return home, with Hell in her heart, knowing in life no
+purpose but that of avenging the parent her folly had destroyed. As she
+was being carried past the Alcazar, she espied across the open space
+a tall, slim figure in black, in whom she recognized her lover, and
+straightway she sent the page who paced beside her litter to call him to
+her side. The summons surprised him after what had passed between them;
+moreover, considering her father's present condition, he was reluctant
+to be seen in attendance upon the beautiful, wealthy Isabella de Susan.
+Nevertheless, urged on by curiosity, he went.
+
+Her greeting increased his surprise.
+
+"I am in deep distress, Rodrigo, as you may judge," she told him sadly.
+"You will have heard what has befallen my father?"
+
+He looked at her sharply, yet saw nothing but loveliness rendered more
+appealing by sorrow. Clearly she did not suspect him of betrayal; did
+not realize that an oath extorted by violence--and an oath, moreover, to
+be false to a sacred duty--could not be accounted binding.
+
+"I... I heard of it an hour ago," he lied a thought unsteadily. "I... I
+commiserate you deeply."
+
+"I deserve commiseration," answered she, "and so does my poor father,
+and those others. It is plain that amongst those he trusted there was
+a traitor, a spy, who went straight from that meeting to inform against
+them. If I but had a list it were easy to discover the betrayer. One
+need but ascertain who is the one of all who were present whose arrest
+has been omitted." Her lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. "What
+is to become of me now, alone in the world?" she asked him. "My father
+was my only friend."
+
+The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw here a
+noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.
+
+"Your only friend?" he asked her thickly. "Was there no one else? Is
+there no one else, Isabella?"
+
+"There was," she said, and sighed heavily. "But after what befell last
+night, when... You know what is in my mind. I was distraught then,
+mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so that I could not even
+consider his sin in its full heinousness, nor see how righteous was your
+intent to inform against him. Yet I am thankful that it was not by
+your deletion that he was taken. The thought of that is to-day my only
+consolation."
+
+They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm to
+assist her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to accompany her
+within. But she denied him.
+
+"Not now--though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will come
+and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more able to
+receive you--that is, if I am forgiven for..."
+
+"Not another word," he begged her. "I honour you for what you did. It is
+I who should sue to you for forgiveness."
+
+"You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!" And so she
+left him.
+
+She had found him--had she but known it--a dejected, miserable man in
+the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying Susan he had
+acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage, and partly from
+a sense of religious duty. In counting later the cost to himself,
+he cursed the folly of his rage, and began to wonder if such strict
+observance of religious duty was really worth while to a man who had his
+way to make in the world. In short, he was in the throes of reaction.
+But now, in her unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never
+know. The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of
+deletions--since to do otherwise might be to discourage delators--and
+there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such as took place
+in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de Ataud better pleased
+with the world than he had been since morning.
+
+On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a servant
+announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his hopes, and
+thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he received from her
+a letter which made him the most ample amends:
+
+"Rodrigo,--There is a matter on which we must come early to an
+understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and
+sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated, since as
+the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit. For myself I care
+little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo, since if in spite of what
+has happened you would still wish to make me your wife, as you declared
+on Monday, it would be my wish to come to you well dowered. Now the
+inheritance which would be confiscated by the Holy Office from the
+daughter of a heretic might not be so confiscated from the wife of a
+gentleman of Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide as
+your heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to me.
+
+"Isabella."
+
+She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
+consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His fortune
+was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it seemed, Rodrigo
+was given the chance to make his own by marrying the beautiful Isabella
+at once, before sentence came to be passed upon her father. The
+Holy Office might impose a fine, but would not go further where the
+inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of clean lineage was concerned. He
+was swayed between admiration of her shrewdness and amazement at his own
+good fortune. Also his vanity was immensely flattered.
+
+He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his resolve
+to marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in person, as she had
+bidden him, to carry out the resolve.
+
+She received him in the mansion's best room, a noble chamber furnished
+with a richness such as no other house in Seville could have boasted.
+She had arrayed herself for the interview with an almost wanton cunning
+that should enhance her natural endowments. Her high-waisted gown,
+low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice, was of cloth of gold, edged
+with miniver at skirt and cuffs and neck. On her white bosom hung a
+priceless carcanet of limpid diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of
+her bronze-coloured hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never
+had Don Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure
+and glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now his
+olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms, kissing her
+cheek, her lips, her neck.
+
+"My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!" he murmured, rapturously. Then added
+the impatient question: "The priest? Where is the priest that shall make
+us one?"
+
+Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance.
+Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a
+smile that maddened him.
+
+"You love me, Rodrigo--in spite of all?"
+
+"Love you!" It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost inarticulate
+ejaculation. "Better than life--better than salvation."
+
+She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. "Oh, I am
+glad--so glad--that your love for me is truly strong. I am about to put
+it to the test, perhaps."
+
+He held her very close. "What is this test, beloved?"
+
+"It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
+indissoluble save by death."
+
+"Why, so do I," quoth he, who had so much to gain.
+
+"And, therefore, because after all, though I profess Christianity, there
+is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a marriage that must satisfy
+even my father when he regains his freedom, as I believe he will--for,
+after all, he is not charged with any sin against the faith."
+
+She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his ardour.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, and his voice was strained.
+
+"I mean--you'll not be angry with me?--I mean that I would have us
+married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner,
+but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish
+rites."
+
+Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their
+grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
+
+"Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you'll
+not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife
+you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish
+blood."
+
+His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads
+of sweat stood out upon his brow.
+
+"My God!" he groaned. "What do you ask? I... I can't. It were a
+desecration, a defilement."
+
+She thrust him from her in a passion. "You regard it so? You protest
+love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you
+will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the
+faith that was my forbears', if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you,
+else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me."
+
+Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought
+to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted
+torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she
+had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He
+could go his ways.
+
+The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration,
+a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million
+maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished.
+There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his
+condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement of
+the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained
+where Christian scruples were already half-effaced.
+
+"You do not realize," he cried. "If it were known that I so much as
+contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of
+apostasy, and send me to the fire."
+
+"If that were your only objection it were easily overcome," she informed
+him coldly. "For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is
+waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's sake betray us, and who
+else will ever know?"
+
+"You can be sure of that?"
+
+He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his
+turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten
+in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage
+that filled him with such repugnance.
+
+And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in
+which the conspirators had met.
+
+"Where is the Rabbi?" he asked impatiently, looking round that empty
+room.
+
+"I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him."
+
+"Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?"
+
+"No," she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. "Yet I would not
+have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to this." They were
+odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He was hardly master of the
+wits which in themselves were never of the brightest. "I require you
+to declare that it is your own desire that our marriage should be
+solemnized in accordance with the Jewish rites and the law of Moses."
+
+And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing done and
+ended, made answer hastily:
+
+"Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be so
+married--in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law of Moses.
+And now, where is the Rabbi?" He caught a sound and saw a quiver in
+the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove. "Ah! He is here, I
+suppose...."
+
+He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his hands
+in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside, and forth
+stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt man, stooping
+slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white habit and black cloak of
+the order of St. Dominic, his face lost in the shadows of a black cowl.
+Behind him stood two lay brothers of the order, two armed familiars of
+the Holy Office, displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.
+
+Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those terribly
+damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood blankly at gaze a
+moment, not even seeking to understand how this dread thing had come to
+pass.
+
+The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the
+tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful came the voice of
+that deeply sincere and saintly man.
+
+"My son, I was told this of you--that you were a Judaizer--yet before
+I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in one of your
+lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses. Oh, my poor child, by
+what wicked counsels have you been led so far astray?" The sweet, tender
+eyes of the inquisitor were luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing pity
+shook his gentle voice.
+
+And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He
+flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation.
+
+"It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this. It
+was a trap she baited for my undoing."
+
+"It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I
+was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the
+trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you could
+not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers."
+
+"Father! Hear me, I implore you!" He flung down upon his knees, and held
+out shaking, supplicating hands.
+
+"You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man
+unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told
+that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be
+so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your
+soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good
+and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed
+for you. Yet that you should Judaize--that you should be bound in
+wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism--Oh!" The melancholy voice
+broke off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his
+hands--long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. "Pray now,
+my child, for grace and strength," he exhorted. "Offer up the little
+temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error,
+and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve
+salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my
+prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence."
+
+On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first
+Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators,
+and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the
+ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the
+essentials were already present.
+
+In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of
+the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two
+by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the
+familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand,
+barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by
+halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral,
+where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by
+the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the
+meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.
+
+Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
+accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged
+by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness the
+instrument of her father's ruin.
+
+For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But
+she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she
+returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister
+denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her
+skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de
+Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the
+fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon
+four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
+legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+
+The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+
+There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty
+which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the
+natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the
+Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip
+II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was
+more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
+
+Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the
+dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural daughters--and
+especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of
+cadency--there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a
+class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that
+spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with
+princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore,
+since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it
+was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities
+beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might
+aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
+
+Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to
+the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence
+to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was
+foreordained that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She
+had youth, and youth's hunger of life, and not even the repressive
+conditions in which she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing
+her high spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she was
+beautiful. On the threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle's
+will was to be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have
+beheld the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
+made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear
+witness that she did not go of her own free will.
+
+But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's was,
+under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the
+sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one
+of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges
+unusual to members of religious communities: he granted her a little
+civil list--two ladies-in-waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her
+the title of Excellency, which she still retained even when after her
+hurried novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
+where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in vain;
+but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected body moved
+mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to make up the
+grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is as another
+day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the year
+lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its
+subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and
+fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life loses all purpose and
+object, and sterilizes itself into preparation for death.
+
+Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained
+unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her;
+in time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey
+spirit of the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she must
+nourish her caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses caught in
+passing of the bright, active, stirring world without; and where memory
+stopped she had now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of
+high adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but
+to feed and swell her yearnings.
+
+This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the
+order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the
+great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above
+all he loved to talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with
+whom he had been intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant,
+fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty had led
+the disastrous overseas expedition against the Infidel, which had been
+shattered on the field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
+
+He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants he had
+seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was embarking with
+crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights and men-at-arms, the
+array of German and Italian mercenaries, the young king in his bright
+armour, bare of head--an incarnation of St. Michael--moving forward
+exultantly amid flowers and acclamations to take ship for Africa. And
+she would listen with parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body
+bending forward in her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic.
+Anon when he came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir,
+her dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly
+truthful. He did not say that military incompetence and a presumptuous
+vanity which would listen to no counsels had been the cause of a ruin
+that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal, and finally the very kingdom
+itself. He represented the defeat as due to the overwhelming numbers
+of the Infidel, and dwelt at length upon the closing scene, told her
+in fullest detail how Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of
+those who urged him to fly when all was lost, how the young king, who
+had fought with a lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day's
+defeat, had turned and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to fight
+his last fight and find a knightly death. Thereafter he was seen no
+more.
+
+It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and more
+deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with questions
+touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning his ways
+of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the crown
+of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served but
+to engrave more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of the
+knightly king. Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent girl,
+his empanoplied figure haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that
+her waking senses would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the
+memory of someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the
+memory of the dream--words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten
+of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind not
+calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She was
+enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth, a
+mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She mourned
+him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily and nightly for the
+repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently
+for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the thought that
+she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood
+that had been imposed upon her.
+
+One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.
+
+"Is it so certain that he is dead?" she asked. "When all is said, none
+actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by
+Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not
+possible that he may have survived?"
+
+The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
+impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
+
+"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he lives,
+and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his
+country from the thrall of Spain."
+
+"Then... then..."
+
+Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it wishes to
+believe."
+
+"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.
+
+He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his
+ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in the shadow
+of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed over the wide
+quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground.
+Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously
+pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to
+the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of
+rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and
+mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of
+the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
+Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King
+Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as
+claustral conditions would permit.
+
+At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
+
+"Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to
+preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted
+one who had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned by a person of
+eminence to have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only
+was he alive, but he would be secretly present at the Requiem."
+
+He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted lips.
+
+"But that," he added, "was fifteen years ago, and since then I have had
+no sign. At first I thought it possible... there was a story afloat that
+might have been true... But fifteen years!" He sighed, and shook his
+head.
+
+"What... what was the story?" She was trembling from head to foot.
+
+"On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the gates of
+the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid guard refused to
+open to them, they announced that one of them was King Sebastian, and
+so won admittance. One of the three was wrapped in a cloak, his
+face concealed, and his two companions were observed to show him the
+deference due to royalty."
+
+"Why, then..." she was beginning.
+
+"Ah, but afterwards," he interrupted her, "afterwards, when all
+Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied that King
+Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was affirmed to have been no
+more than a ruse of those men's to gain the shelter of the city."
+
+She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to draw from
+him the admission that it was possible denial and explanation obeyed the
+wishes of the hidden prince.
+
+"Yes, it is possible," he admitted at length, "and it is believed by
+many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-spirited.
+The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon him that he
+preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a throne of which he
+now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal believes it so, and waits and
+hopes."
+
+When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the clear
+conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who hoped
+more fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or yearned more
+passionately to acclaim him should he show himself. And that was much to
+think, for the yearning of Portugal was as the yearning of the slave for
+freedom.
+
+Sebastian's mother was King Philip's sister, whereby King Philip had
+claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of Portugal.
+Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that foreign rule, and
+Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply, passionately patriotic man,
+had been foremost among those who had sought to liberate her. When Don
+Antonio, the sometime Prior of Crato, Sebastian's natural cousin, and
+a bold, ambitious, enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt,
+the friar had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those
+days Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
+renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
+preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a
+vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had unstintingly exerted
+on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was profoundly devoted. After Don
+Antonio's army had been defeated on land by the Duke of Alba, and his
+fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz,
+Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised by his active share in the
+rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In
+the end, because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II.,
+aware of the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
+gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la Real,
+where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant of the
+Princess Anne of Austria.
+
+But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
+nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio--who,
+restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad--or yet to
+abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever
+the independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne.
+And because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into
+conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to
+claim his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the
+great stream of life, were drawn more closely to each other.
+
+But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered and the
+deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she
+reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon a
+reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.
+
+One evening in the spring of 1594--four years after the name of
+Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess--Frey
+Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose
+every inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face
+with a stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention,
+but there was about this man something familiar to the friar, something
+that stirred in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of
+shabby black was that of a common townsman, but there was something in
+his air and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded
+chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of
+intrepidity and assurance.
+
+Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips of
+the stranger--who, in the fading light, might have been of any age from
+thirty to fifty--a puzzled frown upon the brow of the friar. Then the
+man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"God save your paternity," was his greeting.
+
+"God save you, my son," replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him. "I
+seem to know you. Do I?"
+
+The stranger laughed. "Though all the world forget, your paternity
+should remember me."
+
+And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. "My God!" he cried,
+and set a hand upon the fellow's shoulder, looking deeply into those
+bold, grey eyes. "What make you here?"
+
+"I am a pastry-cook."
+
+"A pastry-cook? You?"
+
+"One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
+Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the
+Convent here, and so for the sake of old times--of happier times--I
+bethought me that I might claim your paternity's support." He spoke with
+a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
+
+"Assuredly..." began the priest, and then he checked. "Where is your
+shop?"
+
+"Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?"
+
+Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
+
+For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
+celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went
+straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour,
+desired to see her Excellency.
+
+"Lady," he told her, "I have great news; news that will rejoice your
+heart." She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken
+eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. "Don Sebastian
+lives. I have seen him."
+
+A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled
+until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her brow; her
+breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet,
+and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from
+falling. He saw that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had
+failed to gauge the full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince,
+and for a moment feared that she would swoon under the shock of the news
+he had so recklessly delivered.
+
+"What do you say? Oh, what do you say?" she moaned, her eyes
+half-closed.
+
+He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all
+the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she
+quelled the storm of her emotions.
+
+"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour suffused
+her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. "Where
+is he?"
+
+"Here. Here in Madrigal."
+
+"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"
+
+"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime preacher and
+counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me.
+He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa,
+and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be
+completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his
+impatiently awaiting people."
+
+It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
+turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful
+fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant
+companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative,
+starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living
+reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body.
+It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared
+not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him
+with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.
+
+Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy
+Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he
+had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had
+brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his
+bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any
+common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered
+himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been born.
+
+It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her
+hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams,
+particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that
+followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince.
+At last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his
+presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel
+proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
+
+"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these
+years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply touched. He desires
+your leave to come and prostrate himself at your feet."
+
+She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom heaved in
+tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint consent.
+
+Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour,
+where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in the
+background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle height,
+dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme simplicity, yet
+without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had first discovered him.
+
+His hair was of a light brown--the colour to which the golden locks of
+the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago might well have
+faded--his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes were grey. His face was
+handsome, and save for the colour of his eyes and the high arch of his
+nose presented none of the distinguishing and marring features peculiar
+to the House of Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his
+mother.
+
+Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before her.
+
+"I am here to receive your Excellency's commands," he said.
+
+She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
+
+"Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up as a
+pastry-cook?" she asked him.
+
+"To serve your Excellency."
+
+"Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least understand
+is that of a pastry-cook."
+
+The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep sigh.
+
+"If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should not now
+be reduced to following this one."
+
+She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between them was
+very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a promise to come
+soon again, and the undertaking on her side to procure for his shop the
+patronage of the convent.
+
+Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass celebrated
+by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel--which was open to the public--and
+afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy and accompany him thence
+to the convent parlour, where the Princess waited, usually with one
+or another of her attendant nuns. These daily interviews were brief
+at first, but gradually they lengthened until they came to consume
+the hours to dinner-time, and presently even that did not suffice, and
+Sebastian must come again later in the day.
+
+And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also in
+intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's future came
+to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself. His penance had been
+overlong already for what was really no fault at all, since it is the
+heart rather than the deed that Heaven judges, and his heart had been
+pure, his intention in making war upon the Infidel loftily pious.
+Diffidently he admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel
+were of opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
+II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be long
+delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip might oppose
+Sebastian's claims.
+
+Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he spent
+in Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal, within and
+without the convent. She was a nun professed, interdicted from seeing
+any man but her confessor other than through the parlour grating,
+and even then not at such length or with such constancy as this. The
+intimacy between them--fostered and furthered by Frey Miguel--had so
+ripened in a few weeks that Anne was justified in looking upon him as
+her saviour from the living tomb to which she had been condemned, in
+hoping that he would restore her to the life and liberty for which she
+had ever yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
+own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been against
+her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she was still
+within the five probationary years prescribed. Therefore, in her view,
+her vows were revocable.
+
+But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or knowledge,
+and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there was none bold
+enough, considering Anne's royal rank, to offer remonstrance or advice,
+particularly too, considering that her behaviour had the sanction of
+Frey Miguel, the convent's spiritual adviser. But from without, from the
+Provincial of the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
+respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous visits she
+received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk, for which it would
+be wise to cease to give occasion. That recommendation scorched her
+proud, sensitive soul with shame. She sent her servant Roderos at once
+to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed the letter in his hands.
+
+The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
+
+"It was to have been feared," he said, and sighed.
+
+"There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined. Don
+Sebastian must go."
+
+"Go?" Fear robbed her of breath. "Go where?"
+
+"Away from Madrigal--anywhere--and at once; tomorrow at latest." And
+then, seeing the look of horror in her face, "What else, what else?"
+he added, impatiently. "This meddlesome provincial may be stirring up
+trouble already."
+
+She fought down her emotion. "I... I shall see him before he goes?" she
+begged.
+
+"I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider." He flung away in
+deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life was slipping
+from her.
+
+That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room, hoping
+against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona Maria de Grado
+brought word that Espinosa was even then in the convent in Frey Miguel's
+cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled thence without her seeing
+him, And careless of the impropriety of the hour--it was already eight
+o'clock and dusk was falling--she at once dispatched Roderos to the
+friar, bidding him bring Espinosa to her in the parlour.
+
+The friar obeyed, and the lovers--they were no less by now--came face to
+face in anguish.
+
+"My lord, my lord," she cried, casting all prudence to the winds, "what
+is decided?"
+
+"That I leave in the morning," he answered.
+
+"To go where?" She was distraught.
+
+"Where?" He shrugged. "To Valladolid at first, and then... where God
+pleases."
+
+"And when shall I see you again?"
+
+"When... when God pleases."
+
+"Oh, I am terrified... if I should lose you... if I should never see you
+more!" She was panting, distraught.
+
+"Nay, lady, nay," he answered. "I shall come for you when the time is
+ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at the latest, and I
+shall bring with me one who will avouch me."
+
+"What need any to avouch you to me?" she protested, on a note of
+fierceness. "We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free to
+roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless..."
+
+"Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together. See."
+He stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of pounce, some
+quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a quill, and wrote with
+labour, for princes are notoriously poor scholars:
+
+"I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to wife
+the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most serene
+Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the dispensation which I hold
+from two pontiffs."
+
+And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in all
+ages--"El Rey"--the King.
+
+"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.
+
+"How shall this scrawl content me?"
+
+"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."
+
+Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey Miguel
+urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot her own grief,
+and became all solicitude for him, until naught would content her but
+she must empty into his hands her little store of treasure--a hundred
+ducats and such jewels as she possessed, including a gold watch set with
+diamonds and a ring bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of
+all a portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
+
+At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel had gone
+on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he had passionately
+urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had done the same by the
+Princess both weeping now. At last he was gone, and on the arm of Dona
+Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne staggered back to her cell to weep and
+pray.
+
+In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed by her
+sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last she sought to
+mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither he had repaired. Of
+all those letters only two survive.
+
+"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we suffer by
+absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I did not seek
+the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend some moments in
+communion with you, there would be an end to me. What I feel to-day is
+what I feel every day when I recall the happy moments so deliciously
+spent, which are no more. This privation is for me so severe a
+punishment of heaven that I should call it unjust, for without cause I
+find myself deprived of the happiness missed by me for so many years
+and purchased at the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord,
+how willingly, nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the
+misfortunes that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the
+least of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
+term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
+suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It were
+impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
+
+"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I plighted to
+you I shall keep in life and in death, for death itself could not
+tear it from my soul, and this immortal soul will harbour it through
+eternity..."
+
+Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King Philip of
+Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his Valladolid retreat.
+How he filled his days we do not know, beyond the fact that he moved
+freely abroad. For it was in the streets of that town that meddlesome
+Fate brought him face to face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom
+Espinosa had been a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.
+
+Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's
+garments were not in their first freshness they were far from being
+those of a plebeian.
+
+"In whose service may you be now?" quoth the intrigued Gregorio, so soon
+as greetings had passed between them.
+
+Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand of
+his sometime comrade. "Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I am not in
+anybody's service, rather do I require servants myself."
+
+"Why, what is your present situation?"
+
+Loftily Espinosa put him off. "No matter for that," he answered, with a
+dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his cloak about him
+to proceed upon his way. "If there is anything you wish for I shall be
+happy, for old times' sake, to oblige you."
+
+But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
+readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an unsuspected
+state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio. Gregorio's wife
+would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and to hear from his own
+lips of his improved and prosperous state. Gregorio would take no
+refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding to his insistence, went with
+him to the sordid quarter where Gregorio had his dwelling.
+
+About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
+three--Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter displayed
+none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa's prosperity which
+Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed her evil envy, and
+it may have been to nourish it--which is the surest way to punish
+envy--that he made Gregorio a magnificent offer of employment.
+
+"Enter my service," said he, "and I will pay you fifty ducats down and
+four ducats a month."
+
+Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince them he
+displayed a gold watch--most rare possession--set with diamonds, a ring
+of price, and other costly jewels. The couple stared now with dazzled
+eyes.
+
+"But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you had
+been a pastry-cook at Ocana?" burst from Gregorio.
+
+Espinosa smiled. "How many kings and princes have been compelled to
+conceal themselves under disguises?" he asked oracularly. And seeing
+them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it seems, was
+sacred to him--not even the portrait of that lovely, desolate royal lady
+in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked it, and thrust it to them
+across the stains of wine and oil that befouled their table.
+
+"Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain," he bade
+them. "A prince could not have a lovelier bride."
+
+"But she is dressed as a nun," the woman protested. "How, then, can she
+marry?"
+
+"For kings there are no laws," he told her with finality.
+
+At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer he
+had made him. He would come again for the cook's reply, leaving word
+meanwhile of where he was lodged.
+
+They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the woman's
+disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous fear that
+what he had told them of himself might, after all, be true. Upon that
+malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an information with Don Rodrigo
+de Santillan, the Alcalde of Valladolid.
+
+Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find his room
+invaded by alguaziles--the police of the Alcalde. He was arrested and
+dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of himself and of certain
+objects of value found in his possession--more particularly of a ring,
+on the cameo of which was carved a portrait of King Philip.
+
+"I am Gabriel de Espinosa," he answered firmly, "a pastry-cook of
+Madrigal."
+
+"Then how come you by these jewels?"
+
+"They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her account. That
+is the business that has brought me to Valladolid."
+
+"Is this Dona Ana's portrait?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you, then,
+pretend that these were also given you to sell?"
+
+"Why else should they be given me?"
+
+Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as for the
+lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for that? The Alcalde
+conned his man more closely, and noted that dignity of bearing, that
+calm assurance which usually is founded upon birth and worth. He sent
+him to wait in prison, what time he went to ransack the fellow's house
+in Madrigal.
+
+Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously
+found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the
+Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival, the friar had abstracted
+from Espinosa's house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes.
+Unfortunately Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided
+to the box were discovered by the alguaziles. Two of them were from
+Anne--one of which supplies the extract I have given; the other two from
+Frey Miguel himself.
+
+Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
+reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile was kept
+on the alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender,
+Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past
+life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and passionate
+devotion to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of
+his prisoner, and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his
+hands--the man whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms
+by the title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
+had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered the
+arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana at the
+convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the effect of
+surprise. He opened the interview by holding up before her one of the
+letters he had found, asking her if she acknowledged it for her own.
+
+She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his hands,
+tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he caught her wrists
+in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little regard in that moment for
+the blood royal in her veins. King Philip was a stern master, pitiless
+to blunderers, and Don Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he
+suffer that precious letter to be destroyed.
+
+Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments and
+confessed the letter her own.
+
+"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-cook, and
+to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the magistrate.
+
+"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
+she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir and
+subsequent penitential wanderings.
+
+Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
+convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King Philip.
+His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once dispatched Don
+Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the Holy Office to Madrigal
+to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne should be solitarily confined
+in her cell, and her nuns-in-waiting and servants placed under arrest.
+
+Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the prison
+of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with an escort of
+arquebusiers.
+
+"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
+guards, half-mockingly.
+
+Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos, a
+travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that he spoke
+both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos addressed him in
+Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and replied that although he
+had been in Portugal, he could not speak the language.
+
+Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three chief
+prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--succeeded one
+another with a wearisome monotony of results. The Apostolic Commissary
+interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel; Don Rodrigo conducted the
+examinations of Espinosa. But nothing was elicited that took the matter
+forward or tended to dispel its mystery.
+
+The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
+tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times insulting
+interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don Sebastian, and
+wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him for her honour's sake
+to proclaim himself what he really was, declaring to him that the time
+had come to cast off all disguise.
+
+Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
+Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and the
+air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie that
+asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don Rodrigo had
+now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under examination, ever evading
+the magistrate's practiced point when it sought to pin him, and he was
+no less careful to say nothing that should incriminate either of the
+other two prisoners. He denied that he had ever given himself out to be
+Don Sebastian, though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had
+persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.
+
+He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating that he
+had never known either of them--an answer this which would have fitted
+the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after his father's death, and
+quitted in early infancy by his mother.
+
+As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
+that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the belief
+that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He protested that
+he had acted in good faith throughout, and without any thought of
+disloyalty to the King of Spain.
+
+Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison, Espinosa
+was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the Alcalde. At once
+he would have risen and dressed.
+
+"Nay," said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, "that is not necessary for
+what is intended."
+
+It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with tousled
+hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly interpreted
+into a threat of torture. His face grew white.
+
+"It is impossible," he protested. "The King cannot have ordered what you
+suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a man of honour.
+He may require my death, but in an honourable manner, and not upon the
+rack. And as for its being used to make me speak, I have nothing to add
+to what I have said already."
+
+The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim smile.
+
+"I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions. Sometimes
+you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and sometimes a person of
+honourable degree. To hear you at this moment one might suppose that to
+submit you to torture would be to outrage your dignity. What then..."
+
+Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch from the
+hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of the prisoner,
+who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the Alcalde had detected.
+In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that the prisoner's hair and beard
+had turned grey at the roots, and so received the last proof that he had
+to do with the basest of impostures. The fellow had been using dyes,
+the supply of which had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo
+departed well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.
+
+Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too late, and
+even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded to its natural
+grey, and he presented the appearance of what in fact he was--a man of
+sixty, or thereabouts.
+
+Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
+him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from Frey
+Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations, that the
+full truth--known to himself alone--was extracted by the rack.
+
+He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent desire
+to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never abandoned the
+hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio, the Prior of
+Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had devised a plan, primarily
+inspired by the ardent nature of the Princess Anne and her impatience of
+the conventual life. It was while casting about for the chief instrument
+that he fortuitously met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa
+had been a soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain
+and Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had befriended
+Frey Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point of being invaded
+by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril of it. Thus they had
+become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had an instance of the man's
+resource and courage. Further, he was of the height of Don Sebastian and
+of the build to which the king might have grown in the years that were
+sped, and he presented other superficial resemblances to the late king.
+The colour of his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be
+made to play the part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was
+waiting so passionately and confidently. There had been other impostors
+aforetime, but they had lacked the endowments of Espinosa, and their
+origins could be traced without difficulty. In addition to these natural
+endowments, Espinosa should be avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody
+in the world was better qualified in such a matter--and by the niece of
+King Philip, to whom he would be married when he raised his standard.
+It was arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the
+arrangements were complete, where the Pretender would be accredited by
+the exiled friends of Don Antonio residing there--the Prior of Crato
+being a party to the plot. From France Frey Miguel would have worked in
+Portugal through his agents, and presently would have gone there
+himself to stir up a national movement in favour of a pretender so
+fully accredited. Thus he had every hope of restoring Portugal to her
+independence. Once this should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would
+appear in Lisbon, unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of
+the kingdom which had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from Spain.
+
+That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a singleness of
+aim and a detachment from minor considerations that never hesitated
+to sacrifice the princess, together with the chief instrument of the
+intrigue. Was the liberation of a kingdom, the deliverance of a nation
+from servitude, the happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance
+against the fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a
+soldier of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
+plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in Espinosa and
+the man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to dazzle the Gonzales
+at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to the end, which he suffered
+in October of 1595, a full year after his arrest. To the last he avoided
+admissions that should throw light upon his obscure identity and origin.
+
+"If it were known who I am..." he would say, and there break off.
+
+He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with calm
+fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the like dignity,
+after having undergone degradation from his priestly dignity.
+
+As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of shame and
+humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the previous July. The
+Apostolic Commissary notified her of the sentence which King Philip
+had confirmed. She was to be transferred to another convent, there to
+undergo a term of four years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to
+fast on bread and water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of
+ever holding any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term
+as an ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency
+to be extinguished, together with all other honours and privileges
+conferred upon her by King Philip.
+
+The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the King, her
+uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable Philip of Spain
+unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the hunger of her starved
+heart, and chafing under the ascetic life imposed upon her, she had
+allowed herself to be fascinated by the prospect of becoming the
+protectress of one whom she believed to be an unfortunate and romantic
+prince, and of exchanging her convent for a throne.
+
+Her punishment--poor soul--endured for close upon forty years, but the
+most terrible part of it was not that which lay within the prescription
+of King Philip, but that which arose from her own broken and humiliated
+spirit. She had been uplifted a moment by a glorious hope, to be cast
+down again into the blackest despair, to which a shame unspeakable and a
+tortured pride were added.
+
+Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+V. THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+
+The Assassination of Henry IV
+
+In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV. of
+France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
+
+In their conjunction these two events were to influence the destinies of
+Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough, since it was as much
+a commonplace that an old gentleman should die as that Henry of Bearn
+should fall in love. Love had been the main relaxation of his otherwise
+strenuous life, and neither the advancing years--he was fifty-six
+at this date--nor the recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his
+long-suffering Florentine wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
+
+Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King Henry;
+probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in
+women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his
+grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from
+the latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his
+self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned
+Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
+adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
+
+This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in the
+affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I have said,
+in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is difficult, without being
+ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a girl of twenty. Unfortunately
+for him, Charlotte does not appear to have found him so. On the
+contrary, her lovely, empty head was so turned by the flattery of his
+addresses, that she came to reciprocate the passion she inspired.
+
+Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal de
+Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged, the marshal
+found the match extremely suitable, and was willing enough, until the
+King declared himself. Henry used the most impudent frankness.
+
+"Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend," said he. "I am in love,
+and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency. If you should
+marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would hate me. A
+breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you with sincere
+affection."
+
+That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a
+marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give him
+to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent husband
+and being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much, and
+thanked the King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him more
+than ever for his good sense, further opened his mind to him.
+
+"I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have
+her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on.
+Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand
+livres a year with which to amuse himself."
+
+Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
+Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less
+acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a
+hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half
+that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own daughter to wife, without
+stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail.
+
+The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609.
+Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely
+what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the
+Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini
+and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come
+from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King's weakness their own
+opportunity.
+
+The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations
+between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point.
+And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own making was growing about
+him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from
+Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed
+his annoyance into stark apprehension.
+
+When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving all the
+world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor had stepped in,
+and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed
+the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an
+arrangement that did not suit Henry's policy at all, and being then--as
+the result of a wise husbanding of resources--the most powerful prince
+in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements that
+did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the
+difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of
+this matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
+Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be
+united with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was
+now disposed to attach the German princes to his interests.
+
+Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents at the
+court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine ambassador, acting
+upon instructions from certain members of the household of the Queen of
+France, and from others whom Vaucelas said he dared not mention, were
+intriguing to blast Henry's designs against the house of Austria, and to
+bring him willy-nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so
+far in their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
+the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a marriage
+between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
+
+That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal, where
+Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien de Bethune,
+Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he was his closest
+friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King leaned upon him and
+sought his guidance not only in State affairs, but in the most intimate
+and domestic matters. Often already had it fallen to Sully to patch up
+the differences created between husband and wife by Henry's persistent
+infidelities.
+
+The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of the
+closet in which the duke--but newly risen--received him in bed-gown and
+night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came abruptly to the matter.
+
+"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood with
+his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a little
+above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune in jerkin and
+long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a wine-coloured ostrich
+plume. His countenance matched his raiment. Keeneyed, broad of brow,
+with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red lips, a tuft of beard and
+a pair of grizzled, bristling moustachios, he looked half-hero,
+half-satyr; half-Captain, half-Polichinelle.
+
+Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and dignity,
+despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering his high, bald
+crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
+
+"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he, and
+gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me with
+apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than from any
+former attachment of yours."
+
+"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was almost
+sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated. It is the work
+of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no respect for me, at
+least he might consider how he slanders a child of such grace and wit
+and beauty, a lady of her high birth and noble lineage."
+
+There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not missed
+by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window, and flung into a
+chair.
+
+"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her to
+take violent resolutions which might give colour to their pernicious
+designs."
+
+"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.
+
+Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked forth
+the letter from Vaucelas.
+
+"Read that."
+
+Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated: "They
+must be mad!"
+
+"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly sane,
+which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What do you infer,
+Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against resolutions from which
+they know that nothing can turn me while I have life?"
+
+"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.
+
+"In acting thus--in daring to act thus," the King expounded, "they
+proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to live."
+
+"Sire!"
+
+"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am dead."
+
+Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied silence, his
+loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery the truth that he
+perceived.
+
+"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take your
+measures."
+
+"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare not
+name? Can you suggest another than..." He paused, shrinking in horror
+from completing the utterance of his thought. Then, with an abrupt
+gesture, he went on, "... than the Queen herself?"
+
+Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He took his
+chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
+
+"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated
+her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the
+councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of
+yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble
+as I have been foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of Conde.
+Sire, will you not consider where you stand?"
+
+"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the uncompromising
+gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended, "they are gross
+exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am sick with love
+of her. Day and night I see nothing but her gracious image. I sigh and
+fret and fume like any callow lad of twenty. I suffer the tortures of
+the damned. And yet... and yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb
+this passion though it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they
+consume my soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm
+has come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the
+inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how far
+he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the Queen to eat
+nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they have set up for her
+in their own apartments. What can you conclude from that but that they
+suggest that I desire to poison her?"
+
+"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair packing back
+to Florence, and so be rid of them."
+
+Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I have a
+mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it, Sully. Disabuse
+her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess of Conde; make my
+peace with her; convince her of my sincerity, of my firm intention
+to have done with gallantry, so that she on her side will make me the
+sacrifice of banishing the Concinis. You will do this, my friend?"
+
+It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past experience,
+and the task was one in which he was by now well-practiced; but the
+situation had never before been quite so difficult. He rose.
+
+"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may require
+something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may reopen the
+question of her coronation so long and--in her view--so unreasonably
+postponed."
+
+Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an
+instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and this
+instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me. If she will
+dare so much, having so little real power, what might she not do if..."
+He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she demands it we must yield,
+I suppose," he said at length. "But give her to understand that if I
+discover any more of her designs with Spain I shall be provoked to the
+last degree against her. And as an antidote to these machinations at
+Madrid you may publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German
+Princes in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
+arming to that end."
+
+He may have thought--as was long afterwards alleged--that the threat
+itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no power in
+Europe that could have stood against his armies in the field.
+
+On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that Henry
+should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
+
+"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and respect
+the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte solely so that I
+might impose silence upon my own passion."
+
+And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have relied
+absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy it is for a
+heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive itself"--which is
+the most amiable conceivable way of saying that he attached not the
+slightest faith to the King's promise.
+
+Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between the
+royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had taught him;
+and he might have driven a good bargain on his master's behalf but for
+his master's own weakness in supporting him. Maria de' Medici would
+not hear of the banishment of the Concinis, to whom she was so deeply
+attached. She insisted with perfect justice that she was a bitterly
+injured woman, and refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save
+with the condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
+France--which was no more than her due--should be made at once, and that
+the King should give an undertaking not to make himself ridiculous any
+longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of the matters contained
+in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all knowledge, nor would suffer any
+further inquisition.
+
+From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory. But he
+yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged her so much
+in one way that he must make some compensating concessions to her in
+another. This weakness was part of his mental attitude towards her,
+which swung constantly between confidence and diffidence, esteem and
+indifference, affection and coldness; at times he inclined to put her
+from him entirely; at others he opined that no one on his Council was
+more capable of the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation
+aroused by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not
+to admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
+reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
+Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was not
+sincere in the intention.
+
+By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's judgment. The
+court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of Henry's prudence was
+battered down by the vanity of that lovely fool, Charlotte, who must be
+encouraging her royal lover to resume his flattering homage. But both
+appear to have reckoned without the lady's husband.
+
+Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of eighteen thousand
+livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont au Change; and
+you conceive what the charitable ladies of the Court had to say about
+it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur de Conde put himself into
+a fine heat, and said things which pained and annoyed the King
+exceedingly. Henry had amassed a considerable and varied experience
+of jealous husbands in his time; but he had never met one quite so
+intolerable as this nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to
+Sully.
+
+"My friend,--Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
+possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of me. I
+shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile I am obliged
+to talk to him with severity."
+
+More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to withhold
+payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance, and to give
+refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he intended also, no
+doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did not receive a pension of a
+hundred thousand livres a year for nothing.
+
+"If this does not keep him in bounds," Henry concluded, "we must think
+of some other method, for he says the most injurious things of me."
+
+So little did it keep the prince in bounds--as Henry understood the
+phrase--that he immediately packed his belongings, and carried his wife
+off to his country house. It was quite in vain that Henry wrote to him
+representing that this conduct was dishonouring to them both, and that
+the only place for a prince of the blood was the court of his sovereign.
+
+The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took to
+night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the disguise of
+a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre, whose will was
+law in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges, ankle-deep in wet grass,
+spending long hours in love-lore, ecstatic contemplation of her lighted
+window, and all--so far as we can gather--for no other result than the
+aggravation of certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him
+that he was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.
+
+But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded. Henry had
+been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he strayed from the
+path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw to that. And when they
+judged the season ripe, they put her Majesty in possession of the facts.
+So inflamed was she by this fresh breach of trust that war was declared
+anew between the royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours
+could now accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
+
+And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde took
+the desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife, without
+troubling--as was his duty--to obtain the King's consent. On the last
+night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the Louvre, the Chevalier
+du Guet brought him the news of the prince's flight.
+
+"I never in my life," says Bassompierre, who was present, "saw a man so
+distracted or in so violent a passion."
+
+He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing over
+behind him. "I am undone!" was his cry. "Undone! This madman has carried
+off his wife--perhaps to kill her." White and shaking, he turned to
+Bassompierre. "Take care of my money," he bade him, "and go on with the
+game."
+
+He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the Arsenal to
+fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came at once, but in an
+extremely bad temper, for it was late at night, and he was overburdened
+with work.
+
+He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and forward,
+his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind him. The Queen,
+a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart, attended by a few of
+her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her train. Her countenance was
+set and inscrutable, and her brooding eyes were fixed upon the King.
+
+"Ha, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and strained.
+"What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"
+
+"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was excited.
+
+"Nothing! What sort of advice is that?"
+
+"The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be talked
+of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of any consequence
+to you, or capable of giving you the least uneasiness."
+
+The Queen cleared her throat huskily. "Good advice, Monsieur le Duc,"
+she approved him. "He will be wise to follow it." Her voice strained,
+almost threatening. "But, in this matter, I doubt wisdom and he have
+long since become strangers."
+
+That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
+maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and with a
+patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in pursuit of
+the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the road to Landrecy,
+which was enough for him. Stage by stage he followed them in that flight
+to Flanders, picking up the trail as he went, and never pausing until he
+had reached the frontier without overtaking them.
+
+It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it, shed
+tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned letters in
+which she addressed him as her knight, and implored him, as he loved
+her, to come and deliver her from the detestable tyrant who held her in
+thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed his undoing, drove him mad,
+and blinded him to everything--even to the fact that his wife, too, was
+shedding tears, and that these were of rage undiluted by any more tender
+emotion.
+
+He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the Prince
+of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke declined with
+dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law of nations, Henry
+dispatched Coeuvres secretly to Brussels to carry off thence the
+princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the alert, and frustrated the
+design by sending a warning of what was intended to the Marquis Spinola,
+as a result of which the Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for
+greater security in the Archduke's own palace.
+
+Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which he
+continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses, Henry took
+the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade the Low Countries
+as the first step in the execution of that design of a war with Spain
+which hitherto had been little more than a presence. The matter of the
+Duchy of Cleves was a pretext ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he
+desired he would set Europe in a blaze.
+
+He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the new year,
+and in the months that followed France rang with preparations. It rang,
+too, with other things which should have given him pause. It rang with
+the voice of preachers giving expression to the popular view; that
+Cleves was not worth fighting for, that the war was unrighteous--a war
+undertaken by Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against the
+very champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring too,
+with prophecies of the King's approaching end.
+
+These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin, and the
+astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the stars that May
+would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome--from the very pope
+himself came notice of a conspiracy against him in which he was told
+that the very highest in the land were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne,
+and Douai came messages of like purport, and early in May a note was
+found one morning on the altar of the church of Montargis announcing the
+King's approaching death.
+
+But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his preparations
+undeterred by either warnings or prognostications. There had been so
+many conspiracies against his life already that he was become careless
+and indifferent in such matters. Yet surely there never had been one
+that was so abundantly heralded from every quarter, or ever one that
+was hatched under conditions so propitious as those which he had himself
+created now. In his soul he was not at ease, and the source of his
+uneasiness was the coronation of the Queen, for which the preparations
+were now going forward.
+
+He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him from
+any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose influence with the
+Queen was almost such as to give them a control over her--the Concinis
+and their unavowed but obvious ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were
+dead, and the Queen so left that she could be made absolute regent
+during the Dauphin's minority, it was those adventurers who would become
+through her the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and
+gratify to the full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that his
+safety lay in opposing this coronation--already fixed for the 13th
+May--which Maria de' Medici was so insistent should take place before
+his departure for the wars. The matter so preyed upon his mind that last
+he unburdened himself to Sully one day at the Arsenal.
+
+"Oh, my friend," he cried, "this coronation does not please me. My heart
+tells me that some fatality will follow."
+
+He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully could
+only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained awhile in
+deep thought. Then he started up again.
+
+"Pardieu!" he cried. "I shall be murdered in this city. It is their only
+resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation will be the cause of
+my death."
+
+"What a thought, sir!"
+
+"You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed to the
+prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master." And wrinkles deepened
+about the bold, piercing eyes. "It is four months and more since we
+announced our intention of going to war, and France has resounded with
+our preparations. We have made no secret of it. Yet in Spain not a
+finger has been lifted in preparation to resist us, not a sword has been
+sharpened. Upon what does Spain build? Whence her confidence that in
+despite of my firm resolve and my abundant preparations, despite the
+fact announced that I am to march on the last of this month, despite the
+fact that my troops are already in Champagne with a train of artillery
+so complete and well-furnished that France has never seen the like of
+it, and perhaps never will again--whence the confidence that despite all
+this there is no need to prepare defences? Upon what do they build, I
+say, when they assume, as assume they must, that there will be no war?
+Resolve me that, Grand Master."
+
+But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
+
+"You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain builds on
+my death. And who are the friends of Spain here in France? Who was it
+intrigued with Spain in such a way and to such ends as in my lifetime
+could never have been carried to an issue? Ha! You see."
+
+"I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!" cried that
+loyal, honest gentleman. "And yet if you are convinced of it, you should
+break off this coronation, your journey, and your war. If you wish it
+so, it is not difficult to satisfy you."
+
+"Ay, that is it." He came to his feet, and gripped the duke's shoulder
+in his strong, nervous hand. "Break off this coronation, and never
+let me hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can rid my mind of
+apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to fear."
+
+"Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop
+the preparations and dismiss the workmen."
+
+"Ah, wait." The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew
+dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. "Oh, what to
+decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my
+wife take it?"
+
+"Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue
+obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster."
+
+"Perhaps not, perhaps not," he answered. But his tone was not sanguine.
+"Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this thing.
+But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her."
+
+Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the
+Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and
+arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost.
+Maria de' Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's arguments she
+opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
+
+Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she
+would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency
+during the King's absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her,
+the mother of the Dauphin.
+
+And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs
+that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by
+this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced one
+day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
+
+"Those who have the best information," the Nuncio answered boldly,
+"are of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of
+Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France."
+
+Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an
+impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
+
+"Yes, by God!" he cried. "Yes--most certainly I want to have her
+back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God's
+viceregent on earth."
+
+Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to the
+Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than anything that
+had yet happened in this affair, his conscience left him, despite his
+fears, powerless now to thwart her even to the extent of removing those
+pernicious familiars of hers of whose plottings he had all but positive
+evidence.
+
+And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
+magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been
+concerted that the festivities should last four days and conclude on the
+Sunday with the Queen's public entry into Paris. On the Monday the
+King was to set out to take command of his armies, which were already
+marching upon the frontiers.
+
+Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen--convinced by his own admission of
+the real aim and object of the war, and driven by outraged pride to hate
+the man who offered her this crowning insult, and determined that at
+all costs it must be thwarted--had lent an ear to Concini's purpose to
+avenge her, and was ready to repay infidelity with infidelity. Concini
+and his fellow-conspirators had gone to work so confidently that a week
+before the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege, announcing
+that he was going with news of Henry's assassination to the Princes of
+Germany, whilst at the same time accounts of the King's death were being
+published in France and Italy.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
+outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his wife's
+coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony by the title
+of "Madam Regent."
+
+The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience. For
+that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and when he
+sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him of a dream
+in which she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring him with a
+tenderness such as had been utterly foreign to her of late to take great
+care of himself in the days to come. In the morning she renewed those
+entreaties, beseeching him not to leave the Louvre that day, urging that
+she had a premonition it would be fatal to him.
+
+He laughed for answer. "You have heard of the predictions of La Brosse,"
+said he. "Bah! You should not attach credit to such nonsense."
+
+Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
+Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to receive a
+like answer.
+
+Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night's broken rest,
+Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him, he rose,
+pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out into the
+courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he casually asked the
+time, observing the King's pallor and listlessness, took the liberty of
+suggesting that his Majesty might benefit if he took the air.
+
+That chance remark decided Henry's fate. His eyes quickened
+responsively. "You advise well," said he. "Order my coach. I will go to
+the Arsenal to see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed."
+
+On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await their
+masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in a dingy,
+clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that he had once been
+arrested on no better grounds than because it was deemed impossible that
+a man with such a face could be other than a villain.
+
+Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the Louvre, and
+startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With fearful insistence
+she besought him to countermand the order, and not to leave the palace.
+
+"I will but go there and back," he said, laughing at her fears. "I shall
+have returned before you realize that I have gone." And so he went,
+never to return alive.
+
+He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all the
+curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations of the city
+against the Queen's public entry on Sunday. The Duc d'Epernon was on
+his right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis de la Force on his left.
+Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the right boot, whilst near the left
+boot, opposite to Henry, sat Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He was
+attended only by a small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some
+footmen.
+
+The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de la
+Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block occasioned by
+the meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the other with wine. The
+footmen went ahead with the exception of two. Of these, one advanced to
+clear a way for the royal vehicle, whilst the other took the opportunity
+to fasten his garter.
+
+At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the shops,
+came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on the stones
+outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by deliberately standing
+upon one of the spokes of the stationary wheel, he leaned over the Duc
+d'Epernon, and, whipping a long, stout knife from his sleeve, stabbed
+Henry in the breast. The King, who was in the act of reading a letter,
+cried out, and threw up his arms in an instinctive warding movement,
+thereby exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and this time
+the blade went deep.
+
+With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood gushed from
+his mouth.
+
+The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier riding
+through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the stories of his death
+already at that very hour circulating in Antwerp, Malines, Brussels, and
+elsewhere.
+
+The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried by
+Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and stood
+there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself of the
+incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King's gentlemen-in-waiting,
+who had followed the coach, whipped out his sword and would have slain
+him on the spot had he not been restrained by Epernon. The footmen
+seized the fellow, and delivered him over to the captain of the guard.
+He proved to be a school-master of Angouleme--which was Epernon's
+country. His name was Ravaillac.
+
+The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about, and
+driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it was
+announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
+
+But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife that
+had stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to Henry's loyal
+and devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge exactly whence the blow
+had proceeded. With anger and grief in his heart he got to horse, ill
+as he was, and, calling together his people, set out presently for the
+Louvre, with a train one hundred strong, which was presently increased
+to twice that number by many of the King's faithful servants who joined
+his company as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in
+passing slipped a note into his hand.
+
+It was a brief scrawl: "Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done. I have
+seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape any more than
+he did."
+
+Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a gentleman
+named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
+
+"Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself, for this
+strange blow will have fearful consequences."
+
+Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose contents
+were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings mounting swiftly
+to certainty, Sully rode amain towards the Louvre, his train by now
+amounting to some three hundred horse. But at the end of the street he
+was stopped by M. de Vitry, who drew rein as they met.
+
+"Ah, monsieur," Vitry greeted him, "where are you going with such a
+following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with more than
+two or three attendants, which I would not advise you to do. For this
+plot does not end here. I have seen some persons so little sensible of
+the loss they have sustained that they cannot even simulate the grief
+they should feel. Go back, monsieur. There is enough for you to do
+without going to the Louvre."
+
+Persuaded by Vitry's solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart, Sully
+faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently he was
+overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to come at once
+to her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as possible with him.
+"This proposal," he writes, "to go alone and deliver myself into the
+hands of my enemies, who filled the Louvre, was not calculated to allay
+my suspicions."
+
+Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the guards
+and a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the Arsenal, that
+others had been sent to the Temple, where the powder was stored, and
+others again to the treasurer of the Exchequer to stop all the money
+there.
+
+"Convey to the Queen my duty and service," he bade the messenger, "and
+assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I shall continue
+assiduously to attend the affairs of my office." And with that he went
+to shut himself up in the Bastille, whither he was presently followed
+by a stream of her Majesty's envoys, all bidding him to the Louvre.
+But Sully, ill as he was, and now utterly prostrated by all that he had
+endured, put himself to bed and made of his indisposition a sufficient
+excuse.
+
+Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her
+summons, receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for any
+apprehensions. Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain security in
+the esteem in which the Parisians held him. An attempt against him in
+the Louvre itself would prove that the blow that had killed his master
+was not the independent act of a fanatic, as it was being represented;
+and vengeance would follow swiftly upon the heads of those who would
+thus betray themselves of having made of that poor wretch's fanaticism
+an instrument to their evil ends.
+
+In that assurance he went, and he has left on record the burning
+indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction, complacency,
+and even mirth that he discovered in that house of death. The
+Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and perhaps
+conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh hour she had
+sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully, and brought in the
+Dauphin, who flung himself upon the Duke's neck.
+
+"My son," the Queen addressed him, "this is Monsieur de Sully. You must
+love him well, for he was one of the best and most faithful servants of
+the King your father, and I entreat him to continue to serve you in the
+same manner."
+
+Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his
+suspicions were unworthy. But, even then, the sequel would very quickly
+have undeceived him. For very soon thereafter his fall was brought about
+by the Concinis and their creatures, so that no obstacle should remain
+between themselves and the full gratification of their fell ambitions.
+
+At once he saw the whole policy of the dead King subversed; he saw the
+renouncing of all ancient alliances, and the union of the crowns
+of France and Spain; the repealing of all acts of pacification; the
+destruction of the Protestants; the dissipation of the treasures amassed
+by Henry; the disgrace of those who would not receive the yoke of the
+new favourites. All this Sully witnessed in his declining years, and he
+witnessed, too, the rapid rise to the greatest power and dignity in the
+State of that Florentine adventurer, Concino Concini--now bearing the
+title of Marshal d'Ancre--who had so cunningly known how to profit by a
+Queen's jealousy and a King's indiscretions.
+
+As for the miserable Ravaillac, it is pretended that he maintained under
+torture and to the very hour of his death that he had no accomplices,
+that what he had done he had done to prevent an unrighteous war against
+Catholicism and the Pope--which was, no doubt, the falsehood with which
+those who used him played upon his fanaticism and whetted him to their
+service. I say "pretended" because, after all, complete records of his
+examinations are not discoverable, and there is a story that when at the
+point of death, seeing himself abandoned by those in whom perhaps he had
+trusted, he signified a desire to confess, and did so confess; but the
+notary Voisin, who took his depositions in articulo mortis, set them
+down in a hand so slovenly as to be afterwards undecipherable.
+
+That may or may not be true. But the statement that when the President
+du Harlay sought to pursue inquiries into certain allegations by a woman
+named d'Escoman, which incriminated the Duc d'Epernon, he received a
+royal order to desist, rests upon sound authority.
+
+That is the story of the assassination of Henry IV. re-told in the
+light of certain records which appear to me to have been insufficiently
+studied. They should suggest a train of speculation leading to
+inferences which, whilst obvious, I hesitate to define absolutely.
+
+"If it be asked," says Perefixe, "who were the friends that suggested to
+Ravaillac so damnable a design, history replies that it is ignorant and
+that upon an action of such consequences it is not permissible to give
+suspicions and conjectures for certain truths. The judges themselves who
+interrogated him dared not open their mouths, and never mentioned the
+matter but with gestures of horror and amazement."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+
+The Murder of Amy Robsart
+
+There had been a banquet, followed by a masque, and this again by a
+dance in which the young queen had paired off with Lord Robert Dudley,
+who in repute was the handsomest man in Europe, just as in fact he was
+the vainest, shallowest, and most unscrupulous. There had been homage
+and flattery lavishly expressed, and there was a hint of masked
+hostility from certain quarters to spice the adventure, and to thrill
+her bold young spirit. Never yet in all the months of her reign since
+her coronation in January of last year had she felt so much a queen, and
+so conscious of the power of her high estate; never so much a woman,
+and so conscious of the weakness of her sex. The interaction of those
+conflicting senses wrought upon her like a heady wine. She leaned more
+heavily upon the silken arm of her handsome Master of the Horse, and
+careless in her intoxication of what might be thought or said, she--who
+by the intimate favour shown him had already loosed the tongue of
+Scandal and set it chattering in every court in Europe--drew him forth
+from that thronged and glittering chamber of the Palace of Whitehall
+into the outer solitude and friendly gloom.
+
+And he, nothing loth to obey the suasion of that white hand upon his
+arm, exultant, indeed, to parade before them all the power he had with
+her, went willingly enough. Let Norfolk and Sussex scowl, let Arundel
+bite his lip until it bled, and sober Cecil stare cold disapproval. They
+should mend their countenances soon, and weigh their words or be for
+ever silenced, when he was master in England. And that he would soon be
+master he was assured to-night by every glance of her blue eyes, by the
+pressure of that fair hand upon his arm, by the languishing abandonment
+with which that warm young body swayed towards him, as they passed out
+from the blaze of lights and the strains of music into the gloom and
+silence of the gallery leading to the terrace.
+
+"Out--let us go out, Robin. Let me have air," she almost panted, as she
+drew him on.
+
+Assuredly he would be master soon. Indeed, he might have been master
+already but for that wife of his, that stumbling-block to his ambition,
+who practiced the housewifely virtues at Cumnor Place, and clung so
+tenaciously and so inconsiderately to life in spite of all his plans to
+relieve her of the burden of it.
+
+For a year and more his name had been coupled with the Queen's in a
+tale that hurt her honour as a woman and imperilled her dignity as a
+sovereign. Already in October of 1559 Alvarez de Quadra, the Spanish
+ambassador, had written home: "I have learnt certain things as to the
+terms on which the Queen and Lord Robert stand towards each other which
+I could not have believed."
+
+That was at a time when de Quadra was one of a dozen ambassadors who
+were competing for her hand, and Lord Robert had, himself, appeared to
+be an ally of de Quadra and an advocate of the Spanish marriage with the
+Archduke Charles. But it was a presence which nowise deceived the astute
+Spaniard, who employed a legion of spies to keep him well informed.
+
+"All the dallying with us," he wrote, "all the dallying with the Swede,
+all the dallying there will be with the rest, one after another, is
+merely to keep Lord Robert's enemies in play until his villainy about
+his wife can be executed."
+
+What that particular villainy was, the ambassador had already stated
+earlier in his letter. "I have learnt from a person who usually gives me
+true information that Lord Robert has sent to have his wife poisoned."
+
+What had actually happened was that Sir Richard Verney--a trusted
+retainer of Lord Robert's--had reported to Dr. Bayley, of New College,
+Oxford, that Lady Robert Dudley was "sad and ailing," and had asked him
+for a potion. But the doctor was learned in more matters than physic. He
+had caught an echo of the tale of Lord Robert's ambition; he had heard
+a whisper that whatever suitors might come from overseas for Elizabeth,
+she would marry none but "my lord"--as Lord Robert was now commonly
+styled. More, he had aforetime heard rumours of the indispositions of
+Lady Robert, yet had never found those rumours verified by the fact.
+Some months ago, it had been reported that her ladyship was suffering
+from cancer of the breast and likely soon to die of it. Yet Dr. Bayley
+had reason to know that a healthier woman did not live in Berkshire.
+
+The good doctor was a capable deductive reasoner, and the conclusion
+to which he came was that if they poisoned her under cover of his
+potion--she standing in no need of physic--he might afterwards be
+hanged as a cover for their crime. So he refused to prescribe as he was
+invited, nor troubled to make a secret of invitation and refusal.
+
+For awhile, then, Lord Robert had prudently held his hand; moreover,
+the urgency there had been a year ago, when that host of foreign suitors
+laid siege to Elizabeth of England, had passed, and his lordship could
+afford to wait. But now of a sudden the urgency was returned. Under the
+pressure brought to bear upon her to choose a husband, Elizabeth had
+half-committed herself to marry the Archduke Charles, promising the
+Spanish ambassador a definite answer within a few days.
+
+Lord Robert had felt the earth to be quaking under him; he had seen
+the ruin of his high ambitions; he had watched with rage the expanding
+mockery upon the countenances of Norfolk, Sussex, and those others who
+hated and despised him; and he had cursed that wife of his who knew not
+when to die. But for that obstinacy with which she clung to life he had
+been the Queen's husband these many months, so making an end to suspense
+and to the danger that lies in delay.
+
+To-night the wantonness with which the Queen flaunted before the eyes of
+all her court the predilection in which she held him, came not merely to
+lull his recent doubts and fears, to feed his egregious vanity, and to
+assure him that in her heart he need fear no rival; it came also to
+set his soul Quiver impotent rage. He had but to put forth his hands
+to possess himself of this splendid prize. Yet those hands of his were
+bound while that woman lived at Cumnor. Conceive his feelings as they
+stole away together like any pair of lovers.
+
+Arm in arm they came by a stone gallery, where a stalwart scarlet
+sentinel, a yeoman of the guard, with a Tudor rose embroidered in gold
+upon his back, stood under a lamp set in the wall, with grounded pike
+and body stiffly erect.
+
+The tall young Queen was in crimson satin with cunningly-wrought silver
+embroideries, trimmed with tufted silver fringe, her stomacher stiff
+with silver bullion studded with gold rosettes and Roman pearls, her
+bodice cut low to display her splendid neck, decked by a carcanet of
+pearls and rubies, and surmounted by a fan-like cuff of guipure, high
+behind and sloping towards the bust. Thus she appeared to the sentinel
+as the rays of the single lamp behind him struck fire from her red-gold
+hair. As if by her very gait to express the wantonness of her mood, she
+pointed her toes and walked with head thrown back, smiling up into
+the gipsy face of her companion, who was arrayed from head to foot in
+shimmering ivory satin, with an elegance no man in England could have
+matched.
+
+They came by that stone gallery to a little terrace above the Privy
+Steps. A crescent moon hung low over the Lambeth marshes across the
+river. From a barge that floated gay with lights in mid-stream came
+a tinkle of lutes, and the sweet voice of a singing boy. A moment
+the lovers stood at gaze, entranced by the beauty of the soft, tepid
+September night, so subtly adapted to their mood. Then she fetched a
+sigh, and hung more heavily upon his arm, leaned nearer to his tall,
+vigorous, graceful figure.
+
+"Robin, Robin!" was all she said, but in her voice throbbed a world of
+passionate longing, an exquisite blend of delight and pain.
+
+Judging the season ripe, his arm flashed round her, and drew her
+fiercely close. For a moment she was content to yield, her head against
+his stalwart shoulder, a very woman nestling to the mate of her choice,
+surrendering to her master. Then the queen in her awoke and strangled
+nature. Roughly she disengaged herself from his arm, and stood away, her
+breathing quickened.
+
+"God's Death, Robin!" There was a harsh note in the voice that lately
+had cooed so softly. "You are strangely free, I think."
+
+But he, impudence incarnate, nothing abashed, accustomed to her
+gusty moods, to her alternations between the two natures she had
+inherited--from overbearing father and wanton mother--was determined at
+all costs to take the fullest advantage of the hour, to make an end of
+suspense.
+
+"I am not free, but enslaved--by love and worship of you. Would you deny
+me; Would you?"
+
+"Not I, but fate," she answered heavily, and he knew that the woman at
+Cumnor was in her mind.
+
+"Fate will soon mend the wrong that fate has done--very soon now." He
+took her hand, and, melted again from her dignity, she let it lie in
+his. "When that is done, sweet, then will I claim you for my own."
+
+"When that is done, Robin?" she questioned almost fearfully, as if a
+sudden dread suspicion broke upon her mind. "When what is done?"
+
+He paused a moment to choose his words, what time she stared intently
+into the face that gleamed white in the surrounding gloom.
+
+"When that poor ailing spirit is at rest." And he added: "It will be
+soon."
+
+"Thou hast said the same aforetime, Robin. Yet it has not so fallen
+out."
+
+"She has clung to life beyond what could have been believed of her
+condition," he explained, unconscious of any sinister ambiguity. "But
+the end, I know, is very near--a matter but of days."
+
+"Of days!" she shivered, and moved forward to the edge of the terrace,
+he keeping step beside her. Then she stood awhile in silence, looking
+down at the dark oily surge of water. "You loved her once, Robin?" she
+asked, in a queer, unnatural voice.
+
+"I never loved but once," answered that perfect courtier.
+
+"Yet you married her--men say it was a love marriage. It was a marriage,
+anyway, and you can speak so calmly of her death?" Her tone was
+brooding. She sought understanding that should silence her own lingering
+doubt of him.
+
+"Where lies the blame? Who made me what I am?" Again his bold arm
+encompassed her. Side by side they peered down through the gloom at the
+rushing waters, and he seized an image from them. "Our love is like that
+seething tide," he said. "To resist it is to labour in agony awhile, and
+then to perish."
+
+"And to yield is to be swept away."
+
+"To happiness," he cried, and reverted to his earlier prayer. "Say
+that when... that afterwards, I may claim you for my own. Be true to
+yourself, obey the voice of instinct, and so win to happiness."
+
+She looked up at him, seeking to scan the handsome face in that dim
+light that baffled her, and he observed the tumultuous heave of her
+white breast.
+
+"Can I trust thee, Robin? Can I trust thee? Answer me true!" she
+implored him, adorably weak, entirely woman now.
+
+"What does your own heart answer you?" quoth he, loaning close above
+her.
+
+"I think I can, Robin. And, anyway, I must. I cannot help myself. I am
+but a woman, after all," she murmured, and sighed. "Be it as thou wilt.
+Come to me again when thou art free."
+
+He bent lower, murmuring incoherently, and she put up a hand to pat his
+swarthy bearded cheek.
+
+"I shall make thee greater than any man in England, so thou make me
+happier than any woman."
+
+He caught the hand in his and kissed it passionately, his soul singing
+a triumph song within him. Norfolk and Sussex and those other scowling
+ones should soon be whistled to the master's heel.
+
+As they turned arm in arm into the gallery to retrace their steps,
+they came suddenly face to face with a slim, sleek gentleman, who bowed
+profoundly, a smile upon his crafty, shaven, priestly face. In a smooth
+voice and an accent markedly foreign, he explained that he, too, sought
+the cool of the terrace, not thinking to intrude; and upon that, bowing
+again, he passed on and effaced himself. It was Alvarez de Quadra,
+Bishop of Aquila, the argus-eyed ambassador of Spain.
+
+The young face of the Queen hardened.
+
+"I would I were as well served abroad as the King of Spain is here,"
+she said aloud, that the retreating ambassador might hear the dubious
+compliment; and for my lord's ear alone she added under her breath: "The
+spy! Philip of Spain will hear of this."
+
+"So that he hears something more, what shall it signify?" quoth my lord,
+and laughed.
+
+They paced the length of the gallery in silence, past the yeoman of the
+guard, who kept his watch, and into the first antechamber. Perhaps it
+was that meeting with de Quadra and my lord's answer to her comment that
+prompted what now she asked: "What is it ails her, Robin?"
+
+"A wasting sickness," he answered, never doubting to whom the question
+alluded.
+
+"You said, I think, that... that the end is very near."
+
+He caught her meaning instantly. "Indeed, if she is not dead already,
+she is very nearly so."
+
+He lied, for never had Amy Dudley been in better health. And yet he
+spoke the truth, for in so much as her life depended upon his will,
+it was as good as spent. This was, he knew, a decisive moment of his
+career. The hour was big with fate. If now he were weak or hesitant, the
+chance might slip away and be for ever lost to him. Elizabeth's moods
+were as uncertain as were certain the hostile activities of my lord's
+enemies. He must strike quickly whilst she was in her present frame of
+mind, and bring her to wedlock, be it in public or in private. But first
+he must shake off the paralysing encumbrance of that house-wife down at
+Cumnor.
+
+I believe--from evidence that I account abundant--that he considered
+it with the cold remorselessness of the monstrous egotist he was. An
+upstart, great-grandson to a carpenter, noble only in two descents, and
+in both of them stained by the block, he found a queen--the victim of
+a physical passion that took no account of the worthlessness underlying
+his splendid exterior--reaching out a hand to raise him to a throne.
+Being what he was, he weighed his young wife's life at naught in the
+evil scales of his ambition. And yet he had loved her once, more truly
+perhaps than he could now pretend to love the Queen.
+
+It was some ten years since, as a lad of eighteen, he had taken Sir
+John Robsart's nineteen-year-old daughter to wife. She had brought him
+considerable wealth and still more devotion. Because of this devotion
+she was content to spend her days at Cumnor, whilst he ruffled it at
+court; content to take such crumbs of attention as he could spare her
+upon occasion. And during the past year, whilst he had been plotting her
+death, she had been diligently caring for his interests and fostering
+the prosperity of the Berkshire estate. If he thought of this at all, he
+allowed no weakly sentiment to turn him from his purpose. There was too
+much at stake for that--a throne, no less.
+
+And so, on the morning after that half-surrender of Elizabeth's, we
+find my lord closeted with his henchman, Sir Richard Verney. Sir
+Richard--like his master--was a greedy, unscrupulous, ambitious
+scoundrel, prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of such worldly
+advancement as it lay in my lord's power to give him. My lord perforce
+used perfect frankness with this perfect servant.
+
+"Thou'lt rise or fall with me, Dick," quoth he. "Help me up, then, and
+so mount with me. When I am King, as soon now I shall be, look to me.
+Now to the thing that is to do. Thou'lt have guessed it."
+
+To Sir Richard it was an easy guess, considering how much already he had
+been about this business. He signified as much.
+
+My lord shifted in his elbow-chair, and drew his embroidered bedgown of
+yellow satin closer about his shapely limbs.
+
+"Hast failed me twice before, Richard," said he. "God's death, man, fail
+me not again, or the last chance may go the way of the others. There's a
+magic in the number three. See that I profit by it, or I am undone, and
+thou with me."
+
+"I'd not have failed before, but for that suspicious dotard Bayley,"
+grumbled Verney. "Your lordship bade me see that all was covered."
+
+"Aye, aye. And I bid thee so again. On thy life, leave no footprints
+by which we may be tracked. Bayley is not the only physician in Oxford.
+About it, then, and swiftly. Time is the very soul of fortune in this
+business, with the Spaniard straining at the leash, and Cecil and the
+rest pleading his case with her. Succeed, and thy fortune's made; fail,
+and trouble not to seek me again."
+
+Sir Richard bowed, and took his leave. As he reached the door, his
+lordship stayed him. "If thou bungle, do not look to me. The court goes
+to Windsor to-morrow. Bring me word there within the week." He rose,
+magnificently tall and stately, in his bedgown of embroidered yellow
+satin, his handsome head thrown back, and went after his retainer.
+"Thou'lt not fail me, Dick," said he, a hand upon the lesser scoundrel's
+shoulder. "There is much at issue for me, and for thee with me."
+
+"I will not fail you, my lord," Sir Richard rashly promised, and on that
+they parted.
+
+Sir Richard did not mean to fail. He knew the importance of succeeding,
+and he appreciated the urgency of the business as much as did my lord
+himself. But between his cold, remorseless will to succeed and success
+itself there lay a gulf which it needed all his resource to bridge.
+He paid a short visit to Lady Robert at Cumnor, and professed deepest
+concern to find in her a pallor and an ailing air which no one else had
+yet observed. He expressed himself on the subject to Mrs. Buttelar and
+the other members of her ladyship's household, reproaching them with
+their lack of care of their mistress. Mrs. Buttelar became indignant
+under his reproaches.
+
+"Nay, now, Sir Richard, do you wonder that my lady is sad and downcast
+with such tales as are going of my lord's doings at court, and of what
+there is 'twixt the Queen and him? Her ladyship may be too proud to
+complain, but she suffers the more for that, poor lamb. There was talk
+of a divorce awhile ago that got to her ears."
+
+"Old wives' tales," snorted Sir Richard.
+
+"Likely," agreed Mrs. Buttelar. "Yet when my lord neither comes to
+Cumnor, nor requires her ladyship to go to him, what is she to think,
+poor soul?"
+
+Sir Richard made light of all, and went off to Oxford to find a
+physician more accommodating than Dr. Bayley. But Dr. Bayley had talked
+too much, and it was in vain that Sir Richard pleaded with each of
+the two physicians he sought that her ladyship was ailing--"sad and
+heavy"--and that he must have a potion for her.
+
+Each in turn shook his head. They had no medicine for sorrow, was their
+discreet answer. From his description of her condition, said each, it
+was plain that her ladyship's sickness was of the mind, and, considering
+the tales that were afloat, neither was surprised.
+
+Sir Richard went back to his Oxford lodging with the feeling of a
+man checkmated. For two whole days of that precious time he lay there
+considering what to do. He thought of going to seek a physician in
+Abingdon. But fearing no better success in that quarter, fearing,
+indeed, that in view of the rumours abroad he would merely be
+multiplying what my lord called "footprints," he decided to take
+some other way to his master's ends. He was a resourceful, inventive
+scoundrel, and soon he had devised a plan.
+
+On Friday he wrote from Oxford to Lady Robert, stating that he had a
+communication for her on the subject of his lordship as secret as it was
+urgent. That he desired to come to her at Cumnor again, but dared not do
+so openly. He would come if she would contrive that her servants should
+be absent, and he exhorted her to let no one of them know that he was
+coming, else he might be ruined, out of his desire to serve her.
+
+That letter he dispatched by the hand of his servant Nunweek, desiring
+him to bring an answer. It was a communication that had upon her
+ladyship's troubled mind precisely the effect that the rascal conceived.
+There was about Sir Richard's personality nothing that could suggest
+the villain. He was a smiling, blue-eyed, florid gentleman, of a kindly
+manner that led folk to trust him. And on the occasion of his late
+visit to Cumnor he had displayed such tender solicitude that her
+ladyship--starved of affection as she was--had been deeply touched.
+
+His letter so cunningly couched filled her with vague alarm and with
+anxiety. She had heard so many and such afflicting rumours, and
+had received in my lord's cruel neglect of her such circumstantial
+confirmation of them, that she fastened avidly upon what she deemed the
+chance of learning at last the truth. Sir Richard Verney had my lord's
+confidence, and was much about the court in his attendance upon my lord.
+He would know the truth, and what could this letter mean but that he was
+disposed to tell it.
+
+So she sent him back a line in answer, bidding him come on Sunday
+afternoon. She would contrive to be alone in the house, so that he need
+not fear being seen by any.
+
+As she promised, so she performed, and on the Sunday packed off her
+household to the fair that was being held at Abingdon that day, using
+insistence with the reluctant, and particularly with one of her women,
+a Mrs. Oddingsell, who expressed herself strongly against leaving her
+ladyship alone in that lonely house. At length, however, the last of
+them was got off, and my lady was left impatiently to await her secret
+visitor. It was late afternoon when he arrived, accompanied by Nunweek,
+whom he left to hold the horses under the chestnuts in the avenue.
+Himself he reached the house across the garden, where the blighting hand
+of autumn was already at work.
+
+Within the porch he found her waiting, fretted by her impatience.
+
+"It is very good in you to have come, Sir Richard," was her gracious
+greeting.
+
+"I am your ladyship's devoted servant," was his sufficient answer, and
+he doffed his plumed bonnet, and bowed low before her. "We shall be
+private in your bower above stairs," he added.
+
+"Why, we are private anywhere. I am all alone, as you desired."
+
+"That is very wise--most wise," said he. "Will your ladyship lead the
+way?"
+
+So they went up that steep, spiral staircase, which had loomed so
+prominently in the plans the ingenious scoundrel had evolved. Across
+the gallery on the first floor they entered a little room whose windows
+overlooked the garden. This was her bower--an intimate cosy room,
+reflecting on every hand the gentle, industrious personality of the
+owner. On an oak table near the window were spread some papers and
+account-books concerned with the estate--with which she had sought to
+beguile the time of waiting. She led the way towards this, and, sinking
+into the high-backed chair that stood before it, she looked up at him
+expectantly. She was pale, there were dark stains under her eyes, and
+wistful lines had crept into the sweet face of that neglected wife.
+
+Contemplating his poor victim now, Sir Richard may have compared her
+with the woman by whom my lord desired so impatiently to supplant
+her. She was tall and beautifully shaped, despite an almost maidenly
+slenderness. Her countenance was gentle and adorable, with its soft grey
+eyes and light brown hair, and tender, wistful mouth.
+
+It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently desired
+her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of her. Then he
+obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed the remorseless spur
+of ambition. In reality, then as now, his beacon-light was love of self.
+
+Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious impatience
+to hear the news of her lord which he had promised her, Sir Richard may
+have felt some pang of pity. But, like my lord, he was of those whose
+love of self suffers the rivalry of no weak emotion.
+
+"Your news, Sir Richard," she besought him, her dove-like glance upon
+his florid face--less florid now than was its wont.
+
+He leaned against the table, his back to the window. "Why, it is briefly
+this," said he. "My lord..." And then he checked, and fell into a
+listening attitude.
+
+"What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?"
+
+"No. What is it?" Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting under so
+much mystery.
+
+"Sh! Stay you here," he enjoined. "If we are spied upon..." He left the
+sentence there. Already he was moving quickly, stealthily, towards the
+door. He paused before opening it. "Stay where you are, my lady," he
+enjoined again, so gravely that she could have no thought of disobeying
+him. "I will return at once."
+
+He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There he
+stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of whipcord, attached
+at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle sharpness. That bodkin he drove
+into the edge of one of the panels of the wainscot, in line with the
+topmost step; drawing the cord taut at a height of a foot or so
+above this step, he made fast its other end to the newel-post at
+the stair-head. He had so rehearsed the thing in his mind that the
+performance of it occupied but a few seconds. Such dim light of
+that autumn afternoon as reached the spot would leave that fine cord
+invisible.
+
+Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his absence,
+so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to resolve upon
+disobeying his injunction.
+
+"We move in secret like conspirators," said he, "and so we are easily
+affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my lord himself...
+here?"
+
+"My lord!" she interrupted, coming excitedly to her feet. "Lord Robert?"
+
+"To be sure, my lady. It was he had need to visit you in secret--for did
+the Queen have knowledge of his coming here, it would mean the Tower for
+him. You cannot think what, out of love for you, his lordship suffers.
+The Queen...
+
+"But do you say that he is here, man," her voice shrilled up in
+excitement.
+
+"He is below, my lady. Such is his peril that he dared not set foot in
+Cumnor until he was certain beyond doubt that you are here alone."
+
+"He is below!" she cried, and a flush dyed her pale cheeks, a light
+of gladness quickened her sad eyes. Already she had gathered from his
+cunning words a new and comforting explanation of the things reported to
+her. "He is below!" she repeated. "Oh!" She turned from him, and in an
+instant was speeding towards the door.
+
+He stood rooted there, his nether lip between his teeth, his face a
+ghastly white, whilst she ran on.
+
+"My lord! Robin! Robin!" he heard her calling, as she crossed the
+corridor. Then came a piercing scream that echoed through the silent
+house; a pause; a crashing thud below; and--silence.
+
+Sir Richard remained by the table, immovable. Blood was trickling down
+his chin. He had sunk his teeth through his lip when that scream rang
+out. A long moment thus, as if entranced, awe-stricken. Then he braced
+himself, and went forward, reeling at first like a drunken man. But
+by the time he had reached the stairs he was master of himself again.
+Swiftly, for all his trembling fingers, he unfastened the cord's end
+from the newel-post. The wrench upon it had already pulled the bodkin
+from the wainscot. He went down that abrupt spiral staircase at a
+moderate pace, mechanically coiling the length of whip-cord, and
+bestowing it with the bodkin in his pouch again, and all the while his
+eyes were fixed upon the grey bundle that lay so still at the stairs'
+foot.
+
+He came to it at last, and, pausing, looked more closely. He was
+thankful that there was not the need to touch it. The position of the
+brown-haired head was such as to leave no doubt of the complete success
+of his design. Her neck was broken. Lord Robert Dudley was free to marry
+the Queen.
+
+Deliberately Sir Richard stepped over the huddled body of that poor
+victim of a knave's ambition, crossed the hall, and passed out,
+closing the door. An excellent day's work, thought he, most excellently
+accomplished. The servants, returning from Abingdon Fair on that Sunday
+evening, would find her there. They would publish the fact that in their
+absence her ladyship had fallen downstairs and broken her neck, and that
+was the end of the matter.
+
+But that was not the end at all. Fate, the ironic interloper, had taken
+a hand in this evil game.
+
+The court had moved a few days earlier to Windsor, and thither on
+the Friday--the 6th of September--came Alvarez de Quadra to seek the
+definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the subject of the
+Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at Whitehall, coupled
+with his mistrust of her promises and experience of her fickleness, had
+rendered him uneasy. Either she was trifling with him, or else she was
+behaving in a manner utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke.
+In either case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must know where
+he stood. Having failed to obtain an audience before the court
+left London, he had followed it to Windsor, cursing all women and
+contemplating the advantages of the Salic law.
+
+He found at Windsor an atmosphere of constraint, and it was not until
+the morrow that he obtained an audience with the Queen. Even then this
+was due to chance rather than to design on the part of Elizabeth. For
+they met on the terrace as she was returning from hunting. She dismissed
+those about her, including the stalwart Robert Dudley, and, alone with
+de Quadra, invited him to speak.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am writing to my master, and I desire to know
+whether your Majesty would wish me to add anything to what you have
+announced already as your intention regarding the Archduke."
+
+She knit her brows. The wily Spaniard fenced so closely that there was
+no alternative but to come to grips.
+
+"Why, sir," she answered dryly, "you may tell his Majesty that I
+have come to an absolute decision, which is that I will not marry the
+Archduke."
+
+The colour mounted to the Spaniard's sallow cheeks. Iron self-control
+alone saved him from uttering unpardonable words. Even so he spoke
+sternly:
+
+"This, madame, is not what you had led me to believe when last we talked
+upon the subject."
+
+At another time Elizabeth might have turned upon him and rent him for
+that speech. But it happened that she was in high good-humour that
+afternoon, and disposed to indulgence. She laughed, surveying herself in
+the small steel mirror that dangled from her waist.
+
+"You are ungallant to remind me, my lord," said she. "My sex, you may
+have heard, is privileged to change of mind."
+
+"Then, madame, I pray that you may change it yet again." His tone was
+bitter.
+
+"Your prayer will not be heard. This time I am resolved."
+
+De Quadra bowed. "The King, my master, will not be pleased, I fear."
+
+She looked him straightly in the face, her dark eyes kindling.
+
+"God's death!" said she, "I marry to please myself, and not the King
+your master."
+
+"You are resolved on marriage then?" flashed he.
+
+"And it please you," she mocked him archly, her mood of joyousness
+already conquering her momentary indignation.
+
+"What pleases you must please me also, madame," he answered, in a tone
+so cold that it belied his words. "That it please you, is reason enough
+why you should marry... Whom did your Majesty say?"
+
+"Nay. I named no names. Yet one so astute might hazard a shrewd guess."
+Half-challenging, half-coy, she eyed him over her fan.
+
+"A guess? Nay, madame. I might affront your Majesty."
+
+"How so?"
+
+"If I were deluded by appearances. If I named a subject who signally
+enjoys your royal favour."
+
+"You mean Lord Robert Dudley." She paled a little, and her bosom's heave
+was quickened. "Why should the guess affront me?"
+
+"Because a queen--a wise queen, madame--does not mate with a
+subject--particularly with one who has a wife already."
+
+He had stung her. He had wounded at once the pride of the woman and the
+dignity of the queen, yet in a way that made it difficult for her to
+take direct offense. She bit her lip and mastered her surge of anger.
+Then she laughed, a thought sneeringly.
+
+"Why, as to my Lord Robert's wife, it seems you are less well-informed
+than usual, sir. Lady Robert Dudley is dead, or very nearly so."
+
+And as blank amazement overspread his face, she passed upon her way and
+left him.
+
+But anon, considering, she grew vaguely uneasy, and that very night
+expressed her afflicting doubt to my lord, reporting to him de Quadra's
+words. His lordship, who was mentally near-sighted, laughed.
+
+"He'll change his tone before long," said he.
+
+She set her hands upon his shoulders, and looked up adoringly into his
+handsome gipsy face. Never had he known her so fond as in these
+last days since her surrender to him that night upon the terrace at
+Whitehall, never had she been more the woman and less the queen in her
+bearing towards him.
+
+"You are sure, Robin? You are quite sure?" she pleaded.
+
+He drew her close, she yielding herself to his embrace. "With so much
+at stake could I be less than sure, sweet?" said he, and so convinced
+her--the more easily since he afforded her the conviction she desired.
+
+That was on the night of Saturday, and early on Monday came the news
+which justified him of his assurances. It was brought him to Windsor
+by one of Amy's Cumnor servants, a fellow named Bowes, who, with the
+others, had been away at Abingdon Fair yesterday afternoon, and had
+returned to find his mistress dead at the stairs' foot--the result of an
+accident, as all believed.
+
+It was not quite the news that my lord had been expecting. It staggered
+him a little that an accident so very opportune should have come to
+resolve his difficulties, obviating the need for recourse to those more
+dangerous measures with which he had charged Sir Richard Verney. He
+perceived how suspicion might now fall upon himself, how his enemies
+would direct it, and on the instant made provision. There and then he
+seized a pen, and wrote to his kinsman, Sir Thomas Blount, who even then
+was on his way to Cumnor. He stated in the letter what he had learnt
+from Bowes, bade Blount engage the coroner to make the strictest
+investigation, and send for Amy's natural brother, Appleyard. "Have no
+respect to any living person," was the final injunction of that letter
+which he sent Blount by the hand of Bowes.
+
+And, then, before he could carry to the Queen the news of this accident
+which had broken his matrimonial shackles, Sir Richard Verney arrived
+with the true account. He had expected praise and thanks from his
+master. Instead, he met first dismay, and then anger and fierce
+reproaches.
+
+"My lord, this is unjust," the faithful retainer protested. "Knowing the
+urgency, I took the only way--contrived the accident."
+
+"Pray God," said Dudley, "that the jury find it to have been an
+accident; for if the truth should come to be discovered, I leave you to
+the consequences. I warned you of that before you engaged in this. Look
+for no help from me."
+
+"I look for none," said Sir Richard, stung to hot contempt by the
+meanness and cowardice so characteristic of the miserable egotist he
+served. "Nor will there be the need, for I have left no footprints.
+
+"I hope that may be so, for I tell you, man, that I have ordered a
+strict inquiry, bidding them have no respect to any living person, and
+to that I shall adhere."
+
+"And if, in spite of that, I am not hanged?" quoth Sir Richard, a sneer
+upon his white face.
+
+"Come to me again when the affair is closed, and we will talk of it."
+
+Sir Richard went out, rage and disgust in his heart, leaving my lord
+with rage and fear in his.
+
+Grown calmer now, my lord dressed himself with care and sought the
+Queen to tell her of the accident that had removed the obstacle to their
+marriage. And that same night her Majesty coldly informed de Quadra that
+Lady Robert Dudley had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her
+neck.
+
+The Spaniard received the information with a countenance that was
+inscrutable.
+
+"Your Majesty's gift of prophecy is not so widely known as it deserves
+to be," was his cryptic comment.
+
+She stared at him blankly a moment. Then a sudden uneasy memory awakened
+by his words, she drew him forward to a window embrasure apart from
+those who had stood about her, and for greater security addressed him,
+as he tells us, in Italian.
+
+"I do not think I understand you, sir. Will you be plain with me?" She
+stood erect and stiff, and frowned upon him after the manner of her
+bullying father. But de Quadra held the trumps, and was not easily
+intimidated.
+
+"About the prophecy?" said he. "Why, did not your Majesty foretell the
+poor lady's death a full day before it came to pass? Did you not say
+that she was already dead, or nearly so?"
+
+He saw her blench; saw fear stare from those dark eyes that could be so
+very bold. Then her ever-ready anger followed swiftly.
+
+"'Sblood, man! What do you imply?" she cried, and went on without
+waiting for his answer. "The poor woman was sick and ill, and must
+soon have succumbed; it will no doubt be found that the accident which
+anticipated nature was due to her condition."
+
+Gently he shook his head, relishing her discomfiture, taking
+satisfaction in torturing her who had flouted him and his master, in
+punishing her whom he had every reason to believe guilty.
+
+"Your Majesty, I fear, has been ill-informed on that score. The poor
+lady was in excellent health--and like to have lived for many years--at
+least, so I gather from Sir William Cecil, whose information is usually
+exact."
+
+She clutched his arm. "You told him what I had said?"
+
+"It was indiscreet, perhaps. Yet, how was I to know...?" He left his
+sentence there. "I but expressed my chagrin at your decision on the
+score of the Archduke--hardly a wise decision, if I may be so bold," he
+added slyly.
+
+She caught the suggestion of a bargain, and became instantly suspicious.
+
+"You transcend the duties of your office, my lord," she rebuked him, and
+turned away.
+
+But soon that night she was closeted with Dudley, and closely
+questioning him about the affair. My lord was mightily vehement.
+
+"I take Heaven to be my witness," quoth he, when she all but taxed him
+with having procured his lady's death, "that I am innocent of any part
+in it. My injunctions to Blount, who has gone to Cumnor, are that the
+matter be sifted without respect to any person, and if it can be shown
+that this is other than the accident I deem it, the murderer shall
+hang."
+
+She flung her arms about his neck, and laid her head on his shoulder.
+"Oh, Robin, Robin, I am full of fears," she wailed, and was nearer to
+tears than he had ever seen her.
+
+But, anon, as the days passed their fears diminished, and finally the
+jury at Cumnor--delayed in their finding, and spurred by my lord to
+exhaustive inquiries--returned a verdict of "found dead," which in all
+the circumstances left his lordship--who was known, moreover, to have
+been at Windsor when his lady died--fully acquitted. Both he and the
+Queen took courage from that finding, and made no secret of it now that
+they would very soon be wed.
+
+But there were many whom that finding did not convince, who read my
+lord too well, and would never suffer him to reap the fruits of his evil
+deed. Prominent among these were Arundel--who himself had aimed at the
+Queen's hand--Norfolk and Pembroke, and behind them was a great mass of
+the people. Indignation against Lord Robert was blazing out, fanned
+by such screaming preachers as Lever, who, from the London pulpits,
+denounced the projected marriage, hinting darkly at the truth of Amy
+Dudley's death.
+
+What was hinted at home was openly expressed abroad, and in Paris Mary
+Stuart ventured a cruel witticism that Elizabeth was to conserve in
+her memory: "The Queen of England," she said, "is about to marry her
+horse-keeper, who has killed his wife to make a place for her."
+
+Yet Elizabeth persisted in her intent to marry Dudley, until the sober
+Cecil conveyed to her towards the end of that month of September some
+notion of the rebellion that was smouldering.
+
+She flared out at him, of course. But he stood his ground.
+
+"There is," he reminded her, "this unfortunate matter of a prophecy, as
+the Bishop of Aquila persists in calling it."
+
+"God's Body! Is the rogue blabbing?"
+
+"What else did your Majesty expect from a man smarting under a sense of
+injury? He has published it broadcast that on the day before Lady Robert
+broke her neck, you told him that she was dead or nearly so. And he
+argues from it a guilty foreknowledge on your Majesty's part of what was
+planned."
+
+"A guilty foreknowledge!" She almost choked in rage, and then fell to
+swearing as furiously in that moment as old King Harry at his worst.
+
+"Madame!" he cried, shaken by her vehemence. "I but report the phrase he
+uses. It is not mine."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"I do not, madame. If I did I should not be here at present."
+
+"Does any subject of mine believe it?"
+
+"They suspend their judgment. They wait to learn the truth from the
+sequel."
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"That if your motive prove to be such as de Quadra and others allege,
+they will be in danger of believing."
+
+"Be plain, man, in God's name. What exactly is alleged?"
+
+He obeyed her very fully.
+
+"That my lord contrived the killing of his wife so that he might have
+liberty to marry your Majesty, and that your Majesty was privy to the
+deed." He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before she could let loose
+her wrath. "It is still in your power, madame, to save your honour,
+which is now in peril. But there is only one way in which you can
+accomplish it. If you put from you all thought of marrying Lord Robert,
+England will believe that de Quadra and those others lied. If you
+persist and carry out your intention, you proclaim the truth of his
+report; and you see what must inevitably follow."
+
+She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
+
+Within a few hours of that interview she delivered her answer to Cecil,
+which was that she had no intention of marrying Dudley.
+
+Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing her heart, by
+renouncing marriage with the only man she could have taken for her mate
+of all who had wooed her. Yet the wound of that renunciation was slow to
+heal. She trifled with the notion of other marriages, but ever and anon,
+in her despair, perhaps, we see her turning longing eyes towards the
+handsome Lord Robert, later made Earl of Leicester. Once, indeed, some
+six years after Amy's death, there was again some talk of her marrying
+him, which was quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how Amy
+died. Between these two, between the fulfilment of her desire and his
+ambition, stood the irreconcilable ghost of his poor murdered wife.
+
+Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression in her
+passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's child:
+"The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but a barren
+stock."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+
+The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+
+Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred voyage to
+El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural, seeing that Sir
+Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but also Sir Walter's very
+good friend and kinsman.
+
+If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality as kinsman or as
+Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him, the cordiality of the latter's
+embrace and the noble entertainment following at the house of Sir
+Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis conducted him, set
+this doubt at rest and relighted the lamp of hope in the despairing soul
+of our adventurer. In Sir Lewis he saw only his kinsman--his very
+good friend and kinsman, to insist upon Stukeley's own description of
+himself--at a time when of all others in his crowded life he needed the
+support of a kinsman and the guidance of a friend.
+
+You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the brightest
+ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might have added lustre
+to that of King James, had not his Sowship--to employ the title bestowed
+upon that prince by his own queen--been too mean of soul to appreciate
+the man's great worth. Courtier, philosopher, soldier, man of letters
+and man of action alike, Ralegh was at once the greatest prose-writer,
+and one of the greatest captains of his age, the last survivor of that
+glorious company--whose other members were Drake and Frobisher and
+Hawkins--that had given England supremacy upon the seas, that had broken
+the power and lowered the pride of Spain.
+
+His was a name that had resounded, to the honour and glory of England,
+throughout the world, a name that, like Drake's, was a thing of hate and
+terror to King Philip and his Spaniards; yet the King of Scots, unclean
+of body and of mind, who had succeeded to the throne of Elizabeth, must
+affect ignorance of that great name which shall never die while England
+lives.
+
+When the splendid courtier stood before him--for at fifty Sir Walter was
+still handsome of person and magnificent of Apparel--James looked him
+over and inquired who he might be. When they had told him:
+
+"I've rawly heard of thee," quoth the royal punster, who sought by such
+atrocities of speech to be acclaimed a wit.
+
+It was ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see this
+great and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge of high
+treason, bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal, peddling lawyers,
+and, finally, although his wit and sincerity had shattered every
+fragment of evidence brought against him, sentenced to death. Thus far
+James went; but he hesitated to go further, hesitated to carry out the
+sentence. Sir Walter had too many friends in England then; the memory of
+his glorious deeds was still too fresh in the public mind, and execution
+might have been attended by serious consequences for King James.
+Besides, one at least of the main objects was achieved. Sir Walter's
+broad acres were confiscate by virtue of that sentence, and King James
+wanted the land--filched thus from one who was England's pride--to
+bestow it upon one of those golden calves of his who were England's
+shame.
+
+"I maun hae the land for Carr. I maun hae it," was his brazen and
+peevish answer to an appeal against the confiscation.
+
+For thirteen years Sir Walter lay in the Tower, under that sentence of
+death passed in 1603, enjoying after a season a certain liberty, visited
+there by his dear lady and his friends, among whom was Henry, Prince of
+Wales, who did not hesitate to publish that no man but his father--whom
+he detested--would keep such a bird in a cage. He beguiled the time in
+literary and scientific pursuits, distilling his essences and writing
+that stupendous work of his, "The History of the World." Thus old age
+crept upon him; but far from quenching the fires of enterprise within
+his adventurer's soul, it brought a restlessness that urged him at last
+to make a bid for liberty. Despairing of winning it from the clemency of
+James, he applied his wits to extracting it from the King's cupidity.
+
+Throughout his life, since the day when first he had brought himself to
+the notice of a Queen by making of his cloak a carpet for her feet, he
+had retained side by side with the dignity of the sage and the
+greatness of the hero, the craft and opportunism of the adventurer. His
+opportunity now was the straitened condition of the royal treasury, a
+hint of which had been let fall by Winwood the Secretary of State. He
+announced at once that he knew of a gold mine in Guiana, the El Dorado
+of the Spaniards.
+
+On his return from a voyage to Guiana in 1595, he had written of it
+thus:
+
+"There the common soldier shall fight for gold instead of pence, pay
+himself with plates half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his bones in
+other wars for provant and penury Those commanders and chieftains that
+shoot at honour and abundance shall find here more rich and beautiful
+cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled
+with treasure than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru."
+
+Winwood now reminded him that as a consequence many expeditions had gone
+out, but failed to discover any of these things.
+
+"That," said Ralegh, "is because those adventurers were ignorant alike
+of the country and of the art of conciliating its inhabitants. Were I
+permitted to go, I would make Guiana to England what Peru has been to
+Spain."
+
+That statement, reported to James in his need, was enough to fire his
+cupidity, and when Ralegh had further added that he would guarantee
+to the Crown one-fifth of the treasure without asking any contribution
+towards the adventure either in money or in ships, he was permitted to
+come forth and prepare for the expedition.
+
+His friends came to his assistance, and in March of 1617 he set sail for
+El Dorado with a well-manned and well-equipped fleet of fourteen ships,
+the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke standing sureties for his return.
+
+From the outset the fates were unpropitious. Disaster closed the
+adventure. Gondomar, the Ambassador of Spain at Whitehall, too
+well-informed of what was afoot, had warned his master. Spanish ships
+waited to frustrate Sir Walter, who was under pledge to avoid all
+conflict with the forces of King Philip. But conflict there was, and
+bloodshed in plenty, about the city of Manoa, which the Spaniards held
+as the key to the country into which the English adventurers sought
+to penetrate. Among the slain were the Governor of Manoa, who was
+Gondomar's own brother, and Sir Walter's eldest son.
+
+To Ralegh, waiting at the mouth of the Orinoco, came his beaten forces
+in retreat, with the terrible news of a happening that meant his
+ruin. Half-maddened, his anguish increased by the loss of his boy, he
+upbraided them so fiercely that Keymis, who had been in charge of
+the expedition, shut himself up in his cabin and shot himself with
+a pocket-pistol. Mutiny followed, and Whitney--most trusted of Sir
+Walter's captains--set sail for England, being followed by six other
+ships of that fleet, which meanwhile had been reduced to twelve. With
+the remaining five the stricken Sir Walter had followed more at leisure.
+What need to hurry? Disgrace, and perhaps death, awaited him in England.
+He knew the power of Spain with James, who was so set upon a Spanish
+marriage for his heir, knew Spain's hatred of himself, and what
+eloquence it would gather in the mouth of Gondomar, intent upon avenging
+his brother's death.
+
+He feared the worst, and so was glad upon landing to have by him a
+kinsman upon whom he could lean for counsel and guidance in this the
+darkest hour of all his life. Sitting late that night in the library of
+Sir Christopher Hare's house, Sir Walter told his cousin in detail the
+story of his misadventure, and confessed to his misgivings.
+
+"My brains are broken," was his cry.
+
+Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to offer.
+
+"It was not expected," said he, "that you would return.
+
+"Not expected?" Sir Walter's bowed white head was suddenly flung back.
+Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed. "What act in
+all my life justified the belief I should be false to honour? My danger
+here was made quite plain, and Captain King would have had me steer a
+course for France, where I had found a welcome and a harbour. But to
+consent I must have been false to my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke,
+who were sureties to the King for my return. Life is still sweet to me,
+despite my three-score years and more, but honour is sweeter still."
+
+And then, because life was sweet, he bluntly asked his cousin: "What is
+the King's intent by me?"
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley, "who shall know what passes in the King's
+mind? From the signs, I judge your case to be none so desperate. You
+have good friends in plenty, among whom, although the poorest, count
+myself the first. Anon, when you are rested, we'll to London by easy
+stages, baiting at the houses of your friends, and enlisting their good
+offices on your behalf."
+
+Ralegh took counsel on the matter with Captain King, a bluff,
+tawny-bearded seaman, who was devoted to him body and soul.
+
+"Sir Lewis proposes it, eh?" quoth the hardy seaman. "And Sir Lewis
+is Vice-Admiral of Devon? He is not by chance bidden to escort you to
+London?"
+
+The Captain, clearly, had escaped the spell of Stukeley's affability.
+Sir Walter was indignant. He had never held his kinsman in great
+esteem, and had never been on the best of terms with him in the past.
+Nevertheless, he was very far from suspecting him of what King implied.
+To convince him that he did Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt
+question to his kinsman in King's presence.
+
+"Nay," said Sir Lewis, "I am not yet bidden to escort you. But as
+Vice-Admiral of Devon I may at any moment be so bidden. It were wiser, I
+hold, not to await such an order. Though even if it come," he made
+haste to add, "you may still count upon my friendship. I am your kinsman
+first, and Vice-Admiral after."
+
+With a smile that irradiated his handsome, virile countenance, Sir
+Walter held out his hand to clasp his cousin's in token of appreciation.
+Captain King expressed no opinion save what might be conveyed in a grunt
+and a shrug.
+
+Guided now unreservedly by his cousin's counsel, Sir Walter set out with
+him upon that journey to London. Captain King went with them, as well
+as Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a Frenchman named Manourie,
+who had made his first appearance in the Plymouth household on the
+previous day. Stukeley explained the fellow as a gifted man of medicine,
+whom he had sent for to cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment
+by which he was afflicted.
+
+Journeying by slow stages, as Sir Lewis had directed, they came at
+last to Brentford. Sir Walter, had he followed his own bent, would have
+journeyed more slowly still, for in a measure, as he neared London,
+apprehensions of what might await him there grew ever darker. He spoke
+of them to King, and the blunt Captain said nothing to dispel them.
+
+"You are being led like a sheep to the shambles," he declared, "and
+you go like a sheep. You should have landed in France, where you have
+friends. Even now it is not too late. A ship could be procured..."
+
+"And my honour could be sunk at sea," Sir Walter harshly concluded, in
+reproof of such counsel.
+
+But at the inn at Brentford he was sought out by a visitor, who brought
+him the like advice in rather different terms. This was De Chesne, the
+secretary of the French envoy, Le Clerc. Cordially welcomed by Ralegh,
+the Frenchman expressed his deep concern to see Sir Walter under arrest.
+
+"You conclude too hastily," laughed Sir Walter.
+
+"Monsieur, I do not conclude. I speak of what I am inform'."
+
+"Misinformed, sir. I am not a prisoner--at least, not yet," he added,
+with a sigh. "I travel of my own free will to London with my good friend
+and kinsman Stukeley to lay the account of my voyage before the King."
+
+"Of your own free will? You travel of your own free will? And you are
+not a prisoner? Ha!" There was bitter mockery in De Chesne's short
+laugh. "C'est bien drole!" And he explained: "Milord the Duke o
+Buckingham, he has write in his master's name to the ambassador Gondomar
+that you are taken and held at the disposal of the King of Spain.
+Gondomar is to inform him whether King Philip wish that you be sent to
+Spain to essay the justice of his Catholic Majesty, or that you suffer
+here. Meanwhile your quarters are being made ready in the Tower. Yet you
+tell me you are not prisoner! You go of your own free will to London.
+Sir Walter, do not be deceive'. If you reach London, you are lost."
+
+Now here was news to shatter Sir Walter's last illusion. Yet desperately
+he clung to the fragments of it. The envoy's secretary must be at fault.
+
+"'Tis yourself are at fault, Sir Walter, in that you trust those about
+you," the Frenchman insisted.
+
+Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. "D'ye mean Stukeley?" quoth he,
+half-indignant already at the mere suggestion.
+
+"Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman." De Chesne shrugged. "You should know
+your family better than I. But who is this Manourie who accompanies you?
+Where is he come from? What you know of him?"
+
+Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing.
+
+"But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation. A spy who does not
+scruple to sell his own people. And I know that letters of commission
+from the Privy Council for your arrest were give' to him in London ten
+days ago. Whether those letters were to himself, or he was just the
+messenger to another, imports nothing. The fact is everything. The
+warrant against you exists, and it is in the hands of one or another of
+those that accompany you. I say no more. As I have tol' you, you should
+know your own family. But of this be sure, they mean that you go to
+the Tower, and so to your death. And now, Sir Walter, if I show you the
+disease I also bring the remedy. I am command' by my master to offer
+you a French barque which is in the Thames, and a safe conduct to the
+Governor of Calais. In France you will find safety and honour, as your
+worth deserve'."
+
+Up sprang Sir Walter from his chair, and flung off the cloak of thought
+in which he had been mantled.
+
+"Impossible," he said. "Impossible! There is my plighted word to return,
+and there are my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who are sureties for me.
+I cannot leave them to suffer by my default."
+
+"They will not suffer at all," De Chesne assured him. He was very well
+informed. "King James has yielded to Spain partly because he fears,
+partly because he will have a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, and
+will do nothing to trouble his good relations with King Philip. But,
+after all, you have friends, whom his Majesty also fears. If you escape'
+you would resolve all his perplexities. I do not believe that any
+obstacle will be offer' to your escape--else why they permit you to
+travel thus without any guard, and to retain your sword?"
+
+Half distracted as he was by what he had learnt, yet Sir Walter clung
+stoutly and obstinately to what he believed to be the only course for a
+man of honour. And so he dismissed De Chesne with messages of gratitude
+but refusal to his master, and sent for Captain King. Together they
+considered all that the secretary had stated, and King agreed with De
+Chesne's implied opinion that it was Sir Lewis himself who held the
+warrant.
+
+They sent for him at once, and Ralegh straightly taxed him with it. Sir
+Lewis as straightly admitted it, and when King thereupon charged him
+with deceit he showed no anger, but only the profoundest grief. He sank
+into a chair, and took his head in his hands.
+
+"What could I do? What could I do?" he cried. "The warrant came in the
+very moment we were setting out. At first I thought of telling you; and
+then I bethought me that to do so would be but to trouble your mind,
+without being able to offer you help."
+
+Sir Walter understood what was implied. "Did you not say," he asked,
+"that you were my kinsman first and Vice-Admiral of Devon after?"
+
+"Ay--and so I am. Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral, which
+has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape, I'd never
+hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as closely as he
+watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And that is why I have held
+my peace on the score of this warrant. What can it help that I should
+trouble you with the matter until at the same time I can offer you some
+way out?"
+
+"The Frenchman has a throat, and throats can be slit," said the
+downright King.
+
+"So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them," returned Sir
+Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first argument, using
+now such forceful logic and obvious sincerity that Sir Walter was
+convinced. He was no less convinced, too, of the peril in which he
+stood. He plied those wits of his, which had rarely failed him in an
+extremity. Manourie was the difficulty. But in his time he had known
+many of these agents who, without sentimental interest and purely for
+the sake of gold, were ready to play such parts; and never yet had
+he known one who was not to be corrupted. So that evening he desired
+Manourie's company in the room above stairs that had been set apart for
+Sir Walter's use. Facing him across the table at which both were seated,
+Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon the board, and, suddenly
+opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady eyes with the jewel sparkling
+in his palm.
+
+"Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?"
+
+Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-featured
+fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's grimly smiling
+eyes, then again at the white diamond, from which the candlelight was
+striking every colour of the rainbow. He made a shrewd estimate of its
+price, and shook his black head. He had quite recovered from the shock
+of Sir Walter's question.
+
+"Not half as much," he confessed, with impudence.
+
+"Then you might find it more remunerative to serve me," said the knight.
+"This jewel is to be earned."
+
+The agent's eyes flickered; he passed his tongue over his lips. "As
+how?" quoth he.
+
+"Briefly thus: I have but learnt of the trammel in which I am taken. I
+must have time to concert my measures of escape, and time is almost at
+an end. You are skilled in drugs, so my kinsman tells me. Can you so
+drug me as to deceive physicians that I am in extremis?"
+
+Manourie considered awhile.
+
+"I... I think I could," he answered presently.
+
+"And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say.. two such
+stones?"
+
+The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it was
+prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir Walter's.
+
+"About it, then." Sir Walter rolled the gem across the board into the
+clutch of the spy, which pounced to meet it. "Keep that in earnest. The
+other will follow when we have cozened them."
+
+Next morning Sir Walter could not resume the journey. When Cotterell
+went to dress him he found his master taken with vomits, and reeling
+like a drunkard. The valet ran to fetch Sir Lewis, and when they
+returned together they found Sir Walter on all fours gnawing the rushes
+on the floor, his face livid and horribly distorted, his brow glistening
+with sweat.
+
+Stukeley, in alarm, ordered Cotterell to get his master back to bed
+and to foment him, which was done. But on the next day there was no
+improvement, and on the third things were in far more serious case.
+The skin of his brow and arms and breast was inflamed, and covered with
+horrible purple blotches--the result of an otherwise harmless ointment
+with which the French empiric had supplied him.
+
+When Stukeley beheld him thus disfigured, and lying apparently inert
+and but half-conscious upon his bed, he backed away in terror. The
+Vice-Admiral had seen afore-time the horrible manifestations of the
+plague, and could not be mistaken here. He fled from the infected air
+of his kinsman's chamber, and summoned what physicians were available
+to pronounce and prescribe. The physicians came--three in number--but
+manifested no eagerness to approach the patient closely. The mere sight
+of him was enough to lead them to the decision that he was afflicted
+with the plague in a singularly virulent form.
+
+Presently one of them plucked up courage so far as to feel the pulse
+of the apparently delirious patient. Its feebleness confirmed his
+diagnosis; moreover the hand he held was cold and turgid. He was not to
+know that Sir Walter had tightly wrapped about his upper arm the ribbon
+from his poniard, and so he was entirely deceived.
+
+The physicians withdrew, and delivered their verdict, whereupon Sir
+Lewis at once sent word of it to the Privy Council.
+
+That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the news,
+came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter's chamber by
+Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman's amazement he
+found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a hand-mirror a face
+that was horrible beyond description with the complacent smile of one
+who takes satisfaction in his appearance. Yet there was no fevered
+madness in the smiling eyes. They were alive with intelligence,
+amounting, indeed, to craft.
+
+"Ah, King!" was the glad welcome "The prophet David did make himself a
+fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard, to escape from the
+hands of his enemies And there was Brutus, ay, and others as memorable
+who have descended to such artifice."
+
+Though he laughed, it is clear that he was seeking to excuse an
+unworthiness of which he was conscious.
+
+"Artifice?" quoth King, aghast. "Is this artifice?"
+
+"Ay--a hedge against my enemies, who will be afraid to approach me."
+
+King sat himself down by his master's bed. "A better hedge against your
+enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of sea 'twixt here and
+France. Would to Heaven you had done as I advised ere you set foot in
+this ungrateful land."
+
+"The omission may be repaired," said Sir Walter.
+
+Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir Walter
+had been reconsidering De Chesne's assurance touching my Lords of
+Arundel and Pembroke, and he had come to conclude--the more readily,
+perhaps because it was as he would have it--that De Chesne was right;
+that to break faith with them were no such great matter after all, nor
+one for which they would be called upon to suffer. And so, now, when it
+was all but too late, he yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and
+consented to save himself by flight to France. King was to go about the
+business of procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need
+of desperate haste, as was shown when presently orders came to Brentford
+for the disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at Salisbury,
+desired that Sir Walter should be conveyed to his own house in London.
+Stukeley reported this to him, proclaiming it a sign of royal favour.
+Sir Walter was not deceived. He knew the reason to be fear lest he
+should infect the Tower with the plague by which he was reported
+stricken.
+
+So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London, and
+safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his loving
+friend and kinsman. Manourie's part being fulfilled and the aim
+accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment by bestowing
+upon him the second diamond--a form of eminently portable currency with
+which the knight was well supplied. On the morrow Manourie was gone,
+dismissed as a consequence of the part he had played.
+
+It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this--a very well informed and
+injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to forfeit the
+knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter secretly concerted
+means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to trust him?
+
+Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he considered
+King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him of his kinsman's
+general neediness, remembered past events that shed light upon his ways
+and nature, and began now at last to have a sense of the man's hypocrisy
+and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned in regard to him precisely as he
+had reasoned in regard to Manourie. The fellow was acquisitive, and
+therefore corruptible. If, indeed, he was so base that he had been
+bought to betray Sir Walter, then he could be bought again to betray
+those who had so bought him.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Sir Walter easily. "It is not lack of trust in you, my
+good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and knowing as I do
+the upright honesty of your character I feared to embarrass you with
+things whose very knowledge must give you the parlous choice of being
+false to that office or false to me."
+
+Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most
+accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have
+fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin
+remember. It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had
+gained to attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France.
+And this notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he
+would lose his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had
+paid for it.
+
+"As to that, you shall be at no loss," Sir Walter assured him. "I could
+not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you shall have a
+thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am safely landed in
+France or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what is to come, here is a
+toy of value for you." And he presented Sir Lewis with a jewel of price,
+a great ruby encrusted in diamonds.
+
+Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir Lewis
+was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir Walter's plans,
+and to render him all possible assistance. True, this assistance was a
+costly matter; there was this person to be bought and that one; there
+were expenses here and expenses there, incurred by Sir Lewis on his
+kinsman's behalf; and there were odd presents, too, which Stukeley
+seemed to expect and which Sir Walter could not deny him. He had no
+illusions now that King had been right; that here he was dealing with
+a rogue who would exact the uttermost farthing for his services, but
+he was gratified at the shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's
+measure, and did not grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the
+scaffold.
+
+De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his master's offer
+of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such other assistance as Sir
+Walter might require But by now the knight's arrangements were complete.
+His servant Cotterell had come to inform him that his own boatswain,
+now in London, was the owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury,
+admirably suited for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's
+disposal. It had been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King,
+that they should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell
+was bidden desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea at
+once. In view of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily compromising
+the French envoy, Sir Walter gratefully declined the latter's offer.
+
+And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the flight.
+Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of Manourie's
+ointment, had practically recovered his normal appearance, covering his
+long white hair under a Spanish hat, and muffling the half of his face
+in the folds of a cloak, came to Wapping Stairs--that ill-omened place
+of execution of pirates and sea-rovers--accompanied by Cotterell, who
+carried the knight's cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son.
+Out of solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could
+not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage. At the
+head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the foot of them a
+boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at the tiller.
+
+King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
+
+"You feared perhaps we should not come," said Stukeley, with a sneer at
+the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. "Yet now, I trust, you'll do me
+the justice to admit that I have shown myself an honest man."
+
+The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the words.
+
+"I hope that you'll continue so," he answered stiffly.
+
+They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore glided
+slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the ebbing tide.
+
+A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-out,
+observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher up the
+river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if proceeding towards
+London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and follow them. Instantly he
+drew the attention of Sir Walter to that pursuing wherry.
+
+"What's this?" quoth Sir Walter harshly. "Are we betrayed?"
+
+The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their oars.
+
+"Put back," Sir Walter bade them. "I'll not betray my friends to no
+purpose. Put back, and let us home again."
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry. "We are
+more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose be such as you
+suspect--for which suspicion, when all is said, there is no ground. On
+then!" He addressed himself to the watermen, whipping out a pistol, and
+growing truculent in mien and voice. "To your oars! Row, you dogs, or
+I'll pistol you where you sit."
+
+The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But Sir
+Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the wisdom of
+keeping to their down-stream course if they were being followed.
+
+"But are we followed?" cried the impatient Sir Lewis. "'Sdeath, cousin,
+is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and must every
+wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us? If you are to
+halt at every shadow, faith, you'll never accomplish anything. I vow I
+am unfortunate in having a friend whom I would save so full of doubts
+and fears."
+
+Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that he had
+suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under Stukeley's suasion,
+now threw themselves heartily into their task, and onward sped the boat
+through the deepening night, taking but little account of that other
+wherry that hung ever in their wake. In this wise they came at length to
+Greenwich on the last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning
+to grow against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's
+enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring that
+they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
+
+Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade them
+put him ashore at Purfleet.
+
+"And that's the soundest counsel," quoth the boatswain. "For at Purfleet
+we can get horses on to Tilbury."
+
+Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical Captain
+King.
+
+"'Tis useless," he declared to them. "At this hour how shall you get
+horses to go by land?"
+
+And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other wherry
+bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A
+hail came to them across the water.
+
+"Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!" cried Ralegh bitterly, and Stukeley
+swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him. "Put ashore," he
+said shortly, "and let us home."
+
+"Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the enterprise,
+and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be said to me for this
+active assistance in your escape?" His voice was gloomy, his face drawn
+and white.
+
+"Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to seize
+on my private papers?" suggested the ingenious mind of Ralegh.
+
+"I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?" His loom was deepening to
+despair.
+
+Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account. His
+generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his friends than
+with his own doom. He desired to make amends to Stukeley, but had no
+means save such as lay in the power of that currency he used. Having
+naught else to give, he must give that. He plunged his hand into an
+inner pocket, and brought forth a handful of jewels, which he thrust
+upon his kinsman.
+
+"Courage," he urged him. "Up now, and we may yet win out and home, so
+that all will be well with you at least, and you shall not suffer for
+your friendship to me."
+
+Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to serve him.
+
+They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and almost at
+the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately above them. Men
+sprang from her, with the obvious intent of cutting off their retreat.
+
+"Too late!" said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion now that
+the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost. "You must act on
+my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis."
+
+"Indeed, there is no other course," Sir Lewis agreed. "And you are in
+the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined with me
+but to betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each supporting the
+other..."
+
+"I'll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor," roared the Captain
+furiously. "And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld understand my
+meaning."
+
+"So, so?" said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was observed
+that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken their stand beside
+him as if in readiness for action. "Why, then, since you will have it
+so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King's name, on a charge of abetting
+treason."
+
+The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer amazement. Then
+he groped for a pistol to do at last what he realized he should have
+done long since. Instantly he was overpowered. It was only then that Sir
+Walter understood the thing that had happened, and with understanding
+came fury. The old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his
+rapier to put it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But
+he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held by the
+men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert, whom he knew
+for Stukeley's cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert formally asking him for
+the surrender of his sword.
+
+Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked coldly at
+his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the growing light of
+the early summer dawn "Sir Lewis," was all he said, "these actions will
+not turn out to your credit."
+
+He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full one. His
+dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending first
+to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty husk to
+the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with the hare
+and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had
+done no less. Amongst them they had "cozened the great cozener"--to use
+Stukeley's own cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial
+that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it
+was only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant
+of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might the more
+effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter discovered also
+that the ship in which he had landed, and other matters, were to provide
+additional Judas' fees to this acquisitive betrayer.
+
+If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices
+unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost he
+conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond equal. So
+calm and self-possessed and masterly was his defence from the charge of
+piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and so shrewd in its inflaming
+appeal to public opinion, that his judges were constrained to abandon
+that line of prosecution, and could discover no way of giving his head
+to King James save by falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence
+of death against him. Of this they now ordered execution.
+
+Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it met
+death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with that
+elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He wore a ruff
+band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a doublet of hair-coloured
+satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black cut taffety breeches and
+ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his plumed hat he covered his white
+locks with a wrought nightcap. This last he bestowed on his way to the
+scaffold upon a bald-headed old man who had come to take a last look of
+him, with the observation that he was more in need of it than himself.
+When he had removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as
+usual. This was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the prison
+of the Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir Walter had put him
+off with a laugh and a jest.
+
+"Let them comb it that shall have it," he had said of his own head.
+
+Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him with
+the observation that he had a long journey before him, he called for
+the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers along the edge, and
+smiled.
+
+"Sharp medicine," quoth he, "but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the East:
+
+"It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his heart
+lies right," he said.
+
+Thus passed one of England's greatest heroes, indeed one of the very
+makers of this England, and than his death there is no more shameful
+blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean of
+body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the King of Spain.
+
+A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words--as men must ever
+suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth--declared that England had
+not such another head to cut off.
+
+As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of him was
+destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely forthcoming for
+knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the gold coin of
+the realm by the operation known to-day as "clipping," and with him was
+taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness
+against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself
+by purchasing his pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he
+possessed, and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of
+honour.
+
+Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir Walter
+Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration throughout the land,
+and to be commonly known as "Sir Judas." At Whitehall he suffered
+rebuffs and insults that found a climax in the words addressed to him by
+the Lord Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of his office.
+
+"Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men offer
+thyself in my presence?"
+
+For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a man of
+honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered at him.
+
+"What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On my
+soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the
+country would not suffice, so great is the number."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+
+George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria
+
+He was Insolence incarnate.
+
+Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks
+had attracted the attention of King James--notoriously partial to
+good-looking lads--and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to his
+Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a series of
+acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing the vanity and
+levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely was he established in the royal
+favour than he distinguished himself by striking an offending gentleman
+in the very presence of his sovereign--an act of such gross disrespect
+to royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded,
+had not the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly
+maimed.
+
+Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
+greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to
+show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the main planks
+of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his
+head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless,
+insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple
+country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had
+risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
+
+The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that, as
+John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness
+in him--of the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as
+megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect for
+anybody or anything. The Commons of England and the immensely dignified
+Court of Spain--during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at
+Madrid--were alike the butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But
+the crowning insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act
+of which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the banks
+of the river Somme.
+
+Three weeks ago--on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise--Buckingham had
+arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task of
+conducting to England the King of France's sister, Henrietta Maria, who
+three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.
+
+The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of
+his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion
+for ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was
+proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due
+to himself to extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming
+to the Louvre he literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet
+with a short cloak in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with
+diamonds to the value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond
+clasped the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of
+his sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten gold;
+the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on his breast.
+On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of
+intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he moved he shook them off
+like raindrops, and left them to lie where they fell, as largesse for
+pages and the lesser fry of the Court.
+
+His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
+effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth
+of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train. There were
+musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a
+score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six
+outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all
+arrayed as became the satellites of a star of such great magnitude.
+
+Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the
+fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of
+this superb and scintillating ambassador.
+
+Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might
+have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent assurance was
+proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious
+only that what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with
+an air of easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was
+nothing that was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with
+the gloomy Louis XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more
+intoxicated with his very obvious success, he condescended to observe
+approvingly the fresh beauty of the young Queen.
+
+Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be one
+of the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good height and
+carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a ravishing fairness of
+skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness had come to invest with an
+indefinable tenderness her splendid eyes. Her childless marriage to the
+young King of France, which had endured now for ten years, had hardly
+been successful. Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and
+difficult to convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof,
+throwing up between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of
+dislike.
+
+There is a story--and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it--that in the
+early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu had fallen deeply
+in love with her, and that she, with the mischief of an irresponsible
+young girl, had encouraged him, merely to betray him to a ridicule which
+his proud spirit had never been able to forgive. Be that or another
+the reason, the fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected her to
+his vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who by a
+hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King's mind, and thus kept
+ever open the gulf between the two.
+
+The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and admiration
+kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling figure of my Lord of
+Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a figure of romance, a prince out
+of a fairy-tale.
+
+That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his monstrous
+arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of his vanity he
+would add that of the love of a beautiful young queen. Perhaps he was
+thrilled in his madness by the thought of the peril that would spice
+such an adventure. Into that adventure he plunged forthwith. He wooed
+her during the eight days that he abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly,
+contemptuous of courtiers and of the very King himself. At the Louvre,
+at the Hotel de Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother
+held her Court, at the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the
+Queen's side.
+
+Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the Duke's
+cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart, and may even
+have resented that so shallow a man should have been sent to treat with
+a statesman of his own caliber--for other business beside the marriage
+had brought Buckingham to Paris--suggested to the King that the Duke's
+manner in approaching the Queen lacked a proper deference, and the
+Queen's manner of receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore the
+King's long face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he looked
+on. Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl was mere
+incense to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on to greater
+daring.
+
+On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand French
+nobles and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue, quitted Paris to
+accompany Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England, on the first stage of
+her journey to her new home. The King was not of the party. He had
+gone with Richelieu to Fontainebieau, leaving it to the Queen and the
+Queen-Mother to accompany his sister.
+
+Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his attentions
+upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place should be beside the
+carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did not apply to His Insolence of
+Buckingham, so indifferent of whom he might slight or offend. And then
+the devil took a hand in the game.
+
+At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was compelled to
+halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the repose she required.
+Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the presence of three queens at
+one and the same time within its walls, the Duc de Chaulnes gave an
+entertainment in the Citadel. Buckingham attended this, and in the dance
+that followed the banquet it was Buckingham who led out the Queen.
+
+Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop's Palace, where it
+was lodged, and a small company went out to take the evening cool in the
+Bishop's fragrant gardens on the Somme, Buckingham ever at the Queen's
+side. Anne of Austria was attended by her Mistress of the Household,
+the beautiful, witty Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, and by her
+equerry, Monsieur de Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for cavalier that
+handsome coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of Buckingham's creatures,
+between whom and herself a certain transient tenderness had sprung up.
+M. de Putange was accompanied by Madame de Vernet, with whom at the time
+he was over head and ears in love. Elsewhere about the spacious gardens
+other courtiers sauntered.
+
+Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply
+engrossed in their respective companions, or else the state of their
+own hearts and the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them complacently
+towards the affair of gallantry upon which their mistress almost seemed
+to wish to be embarked. They forgot, it would seem, that she was a
+queen, and remembered sympathetically that she was a woman, and that she
+had for companion the most splendid cavalier in all the world. Thus they
+committed the unpardonable fault of lagging behind, and allowing her to
+pass out of their sight round the bend of an avenue by the water.
+
+No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the Queen, that
+the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them from observation,
+than, piling audacity up on audacity, he determined to accomplish here
+and now the conquest of this lovely lady who had used him so graciously
+and received his advances with such manifest pleasure.
+
+"How soft the night! How exquisite!" he sighed.
+
+"Indeed," she agreed. "And how still, but for the gentle murmur of the
+river."
+
+"The river!" he cried, on a new note. "That is no gentle murmur. The
+river laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil."
+
+"Evil?" quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now side
+by side.
+
+"Evil," he repeated. "Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea that soon
+shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing wickedly in the
+pain that will presently be mine."
+
+It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her
+discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether
+she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal
+aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had
+taught her she must ever dwell.
+
+"Oh, but Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, you will be with us again, perhaps
+before so very long."
+
+His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near her
+face that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
+
+"Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your pity,
+say but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear down half a
+world to reach you."
+
+She recoiled in fright and displeasure before a wooing so impetuous and
+violently outspoken; though the displeasure was perhaps but a passing
+emotion, the result of early training. Yet she contrived to answer him
+with the proper icy dignity due to her position as a princess of Spain,
+now Queen of France.
+
+"Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not listen to
+such words. You are mad, I think."
+
+"Yes, I am mad," he flung back. "Mad with love--so mad that I have
+forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the ambassador
+there is a man, under the queen a woman--our real selves, not the titles
+with which Fate seeks to dissemble our true natures. And with the whole
+strength of my true nature do I love you, so potently, so overwhelmingly
+that I will not believe you sensible of no response."
+
+Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little off
+her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true; but also
+a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever addressed her in
+anything approaching this manner, no one had ever so much as suggested
+that her existence could matter greatly, that in her woman's nature
+there was the magic power of awakening passion and devotion. He was so
+splendidly magnificent, so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus
+to lay his being, as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a
+little, who knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to
+repulse him, and the effort was not very convincing.
+
+"Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It ... it
+hurts."
+
+O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he wounded, for
+she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But he in his egregious
+vanity must of course misunderstand.
+
+"Hurts!" he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have warned
+her. "Because you resist it, because you fight against the commands of
+your true self. Anne!" He seized her, and crushed her to him. "Anne!"
+
+Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger, too,
+her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A scream, loud and
+piercing, broke from her and rang through the still garden. It brought
+him to his senses. It was as if he had been lifted up into the air, and
+then suddenly allowed to fall.
+
+He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips, and when
+an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in alarm, his hand
+upon his sword, those two stood with the width of the avenue between
+them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen breathing hard and
+trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as if to repress its tumult.
+
+"Madame! Madame!" had been Putange's cry, as he sprang forward in alarm
+and self-reproach.
+
+He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other in
+bewilderment. Neither spoke.
+
+"You cried out, Madame," M. de Putange reminded her, and Buckingham
+may well have wondered whether presently he would be receiving M. de
+Putange's sword in his vitals. He must have known that his life now hung
+upon her answer.
+
+"I called you, that was all," said the Queen, in a voice that she strove
+to render calm. "I confess that I was startled to find myself alone with
+M. L'Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again, M. de Putange!"
+
+The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from his
+sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions as to
+what must have happened. But he was relieved there were to be no
+complications. The others now coming up with them, the party thereafter
+kept together until presently Buckingham and Lord Holland took their
+leave.
+
+On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was accomplished.
+A little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave of Henrietta Maria,
+entrusting her now to Buckingham and his followers, who were to convey
+her safely to Charles.
+
+It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to Anne of
+Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de Conti for only
+companion.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am come to take my leave."
+
+"Fare you well, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur," she said, and her voice was
+warm and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
+
+"I am come to ask your pardon, madame," he said, in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, monsieur--no more, I beg you." She looked down; her hands were
+trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
+
+He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none might see
+him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld tears in his eyes.
+
+"Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for having
+discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were idle to ask
+pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I can help drawing
+breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the will to live. I gave
+expression to something that dominates my whole being, and will ever
+dominate it as long as I have life. Adieu, madame! At need you know
+where a servant who will gladly die for you is to be found." He kissed
+the hem of her robe, dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and
+was gone before she could say a word in answer.
+
+She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti, watching
+her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
+
+"I will answer for the Queen's virtue," she stated afterwards, "but I
+cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart, since without
+doubt the Duke's tears affected her spirits."
+
+But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he was
+met by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him regarding
+the negotiations he had been empowered to carry out with France in the
+matter of an alliance against Spain--negotiations which had not
+thriven with Louis and Richelieu, possibly because the ambassador was
+ill-chosen. The instructions came too late to be of use, but in time to
+serve as a pretext for Buckingham's return to Amiens. There he sought an
+audience of the Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a futile
+message for the King. This chimerical business--as Madame de Motteville
+shrewdly calls it--being accomplished, he came to the real matter which
+had prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and sought audience
+of Anne of Austria.
+
+It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the levées at
+the Court of France were precisely what the word implies, and they were
+held by royalty whilst still abed. It was not, therefore, amazing that
+he should have been admitted to her presence. She was alone save for her
+lady-in-waiting, Madame de Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged, prudent
+and virtuous. Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of this lady
+upon seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into the room,
+and on his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and bear it to
+his lips.
+
+Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de Lannoi
+became a pillar of icy dignity.
+
+"M. le Duc," says she, "it is not customary in France to kneel when
+speaking to the Queen."
+
+"I care nothing for the customs of France, madame," he answered rudely.
+"I am not a Frenchman."
+
+"That is too obvious, monsieur," snapped the elderly, prudent and
+virtuous countess. "Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps monsieur will
+perceive the convenience of conforming to French customs. Let me call
+for a chair for Monsieur le Duc."
+
+"I do not want a chair, madame."
+
+The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, "I suppose one
+cannot expect anything else in a foreigner," and let him kneel as he
+insisted, placing herself, however, protectingly at the Queen's pillow.
+
+Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi's presence
+no more than if she had been part of the room's furniture, the Duke
+delivered himself freely of what was in his mind. He had been obliged to
+return to Amiens on a matter of State. It was unthinkable that he should
+be so near to her Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her feet;
+and whilst gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her
+matchless perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of
+his soul, allow himself the only felicity life now held for him--that of
+protesting himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the kind,
+did he pour out, what time the Queen, embarrassed and annoyed beyond
+utterance, could only stare at him in silence.
+
+Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a rashness
+beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of
+women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King's ears,
+a tale that must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham,
+in his self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing.
+One suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name
+linked with the Queen's by the lips of scandal.
+
+She found her tongue at last.
+
+"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not necessary,
+it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have
+leave to go."
+
+He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps
+to the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so
+indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and
+reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes,
+and hand on heart--
+
+"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
+
+Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what
+had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken
+place under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip
+wagging. An echo of it reached the King, together with the story of that
+other business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the Duke of
+Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against
+the Queen, sought to feed the King's suspicions.
+
+"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
+Buckingham do to make her cry out?"
+
+"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she did
+cry out."
+
+Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
+abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired
+of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's movements, and the
+fullest particulars of his private life.
+
+Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents
+of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen.
+For he intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long,
+and complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and
+the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the
+Duke's interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which
+followed that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that
+amazingly romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey
+life, touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
+loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in which
+pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was away, overseas;
+she might never see him again; therefore there could be little harm in
+indulging the romantic tenderness he had inspired.
+
+So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--as
+La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the Duke a
+trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That love-token--for it
+amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to the
+Duke.
+
+Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire
+to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he
+at once communicated to France that he was coming over as the ambassador
+of the King of England to treat of certain matters connected with
+Spain. But Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in London
+that portraits of the Queen of France were excessively abundant at York
+House, the Duke's residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform
+the King. Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
+guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride too
+deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an expression of
+Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a form of vain,
+empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
+
+As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of
+Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable as
+Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning this,
+the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason ("well
+known to himself") and in protesting that he would go to France to see
+the Queen with the French King's consent or without it. This was duly
+reported to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most
+Christian Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on
+the part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
+
+Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who
+was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when
+considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria,
+it is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the
+nature of a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted
+upon believing.
+
+Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other
+matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had a bitter and
+secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself there
+had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the Duke.
+Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into
+correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this
+correspondence he managed her so craftily--says La Rochefoucauld--that
+very soon she was, whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most
+valuable spy near Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was
+mainly concerned with information that would throw light upon the real
+relations of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her
+that nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
+of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment the more
+bitter for being stifled--since for her reputation's sake she dared
+not have given it expression--made her a very ready instrument in
+Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of gossip she did not
+carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But all was naught until one
+day at last she was able to tell him something that set his pulses
+beating more quickly than their habit.
+
+She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
+constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the Queen of
+France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her own. Here, indeed,
+was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed.
+Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain possession of the studs,
+the rest would be easy. There would be an end--and such an end!--to
+the King's obstinate, indolent faith in his wife's indifference to that
+boastful, flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the
+time being, and wrote to the Countess.
+
+Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at York
+House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young French
+Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the evening
+Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful, accomplished and
+ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found her charms so alluring
+that he was almost disposed to blame himself for having perhaps treated
+her too lightly. Yet she seemed at pains to show him that it was his to
+take up again the affair at the point at which it had been dropped.
+She was gay, arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that
+presently, yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
+guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the foot
+of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo Jones had just
+completed for him. My lady languished at his side, permitted him to
+encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a moment lay heavily against
+him. He caught her violently to him, and now her ladyship, hitherto so
+yielding, with true feminine contrariness set herself to resist him. A
+scuffle ensued between them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift
+as a doe across the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his
+Grace in pursuit between vexation and amusement.
+
+But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having been
+fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could discern her
+nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that she had desired
+her carriage to be called, and had left York House immediately upon
+coming in from the garden.
+
+He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It was, in
+fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have taken offense
+at that which she had so obviously invited. But then she always had been
+a perverse and provoking jade. With that reflection he put her from his
+mind.
+
+But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the great
+house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident again.
+Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his fine,
+pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-laugh, he rose
+to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him, and brought in his valet
+from an adjoining room. The riband of diamond studs was gone.
+
+Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in the
+moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there pale,
+staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There were upon
+his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one of which could
+have been more easily detached. This was the work of some French agent.
+He had made no secret of whence those studs had come to him.
+
+There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of revelation, he
+saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly contradictory behaviour. The
+jade had fooled him. It was she who had stolen the riband. He sat down
+again, his head in his hands, and swiftly, link by link, he pieced
+together a complete chain.
+
+Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he must
+adopt so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was virtually
+the ruler of England, master in these islands of an almost boundless
+power. That power he would exert to the full this very night to thwart
+those enemies of his own and of the Queen's, who worked so subtly in
+concert. Many would be wronged, much harm would be done, the liberties
+of some thousands of freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot.
+What did it matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should
+cover up an indiscretion.
+
+"Set ink and paper yonder," he bade his gaping valet. "Then go call M.
+Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at once, and leave
+word that I shall require a score of couriers to be in the saddle and
+ready to set out in half an hour."
+
+Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down to
+write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the ports of
+England were closed by the King's express command--delivered by his
+minister, the Duke of Buckingham--that measures were being taken--were
+already taken in all southern ports--so that no vessel of any kind
+should leave the island until the King's further pleasure were made
+known. Startled, the people wondered was this enactment the forerunner
+of war. Had they known the truth, they might have been more startled
+still, though in a different manner. As swiftly as couriers could
+travel--and certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape
+overseas--did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were
+tight locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs which meant the
+honour of the Queen of France.
+
+And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones by
+others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to say which
+were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and Gerbier between
+them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished, and a vessel slipped
+down the Thames, allowed to pass by those who kept close watch to
+enforce the royal decree, and made sail for Calais, which was beginning
+to manifest surprise at this entire cessation of traffic from England.
+From that vessel landed Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying
+the Queen of France the duplicate studs, which were to replace those
+which she had sent to Buckingham.
+
+Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and commerce
+was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-four hours too
+late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of Carlisle. His Eminence
+deplored a fine chance lost through the excessive power that was wielded
+in England by the parvenu.
+
+Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed and
+reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object of his
+desires--go to France and see the Queen. Since the country was closed
+to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of war. Blood should
+flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in the end he would go to
+Paris to negotiate a peace, and that should be his opportunity. Other
+reasons there may have been, but none so dominant, none that could not
+have been removed by negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the
+matter of the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against
+their king.
+
+To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition. Disaster
+and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back in disgrace to
+England, and the Duke found himself more detested by the people than he
+had been already--which is saying much. He went off to seek comfort at
+the hands of the two persons who really loved him--his doting King and
+his splendid wife.
+
+But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
+insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
+long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies and
+mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a nation? He
+desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to accomplish that he
+nothing recked that he should set Europe in a blaze, nothing recked what
+blood should be poured out, what treasure dissipated.
+
+Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his friends,
+fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds, urged him to take
+precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater safety.
+
+But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
+
+"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his contemptuous
+answer.
+
+He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
+the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
+superintending the final preparations for that unpopular expedition,
+John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national vengeance, drove a
+knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.
+
+"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation with
+which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances, there seems
+to have been occasion for the prayer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+
+The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+
+Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black winter's
+night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years, picked his way
+carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light of
+a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed brown seaweed and
+trailing green sea slime. Leaning heavily upon the arm which a sailor
+held out to his assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that rose
+and fell on the heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the
+stones, and the frail craft was pushed off.
+
+The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
+steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were swinging
+rhythmically high up against the black background of the night. The
+elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets, looked behind
+him--to look his last upon the England he had loved and served and
+ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow light upon the jetty
+steps, was all of it that he could now see.
+
+He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing there
+above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl
+of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying
+man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward
+Hyde--whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from
+the finality of death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years
+of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law
+student in the Temple when Charles I. was King.
+
+That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
+desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to place
+the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward
+Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels. The present was not
+to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He had known it, and of a bitter
+sort, in those impecunious days when the Second Charles, whose steps
+he guided, was a needy, homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal
+might have thrown over so profitless a service. He had talents that
+would have commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly
+adhering to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly
+in the Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
+achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the Throne of
+England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours in exile on the
+Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time was that James Stuart,
+Duke of York, debauched his daughter.
+
+Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the Restoration;
+it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was accomplished, took in hand
+and carried out the difficult task of welding together the old and
+the new conditions of political affairs. And it was Hyde who was the
+scapegoat when things did not run the course that Englishmen desired.
+As the head of the administration he was held responsible even for those
+acts which he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde
+who was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the
+money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen was
+childless.
+
+The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to Hyde's
+daughter Anne had now been righted by marriage with the Duke of York.
+Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the people, ever ready
+to attach most credit to that which is most incredible and fantastic,
+believed that to ensure the succession of his own grandchildren Hyde had
+deliberately provided Charles with a barren wife.
+
+When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war at
+Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde was openly
+denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with terror and seeking a
+victim in the blind, unreasoning way of public feeling. They broke his
+windows, ravaged his garden, and erected a gibbet before the gates of
+his superb mansion on the north side of Piccadilly.
+
+Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
+commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those qualities
+of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the masses. Nor did he
+court popularity elsewhere. Because he was austere in his morals,
+grave and sober in his conduct, he was hated by those who made up the
+debauched court of his prince. Because he was deeply religious in his
+principles, the Puritans mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was
+autocratic in his policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of
+autocracy being done.
+
+Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles been half
+as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles. For a time, it is
+true, the King stood his friend, and might so have continued to the
+end had not the women become mixed up in the business. As Evelyn, the
+diarist, puts it, this great man's fall was the work of "the buffoones
+and ladys of pleasure."
+
+It really is a very tangled story--this inner history of the fall of
+Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense, it
+is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine of Braganza,
+his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as much as
+any woman wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio is not a
+natural and proper institution.
+
+If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at
+least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which was
+anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection against
+the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the dowry
+offered--five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which would
+give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the Island
+of Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the
+freedom to trade in the East Indies--which Portugal had hitherto kept
+jealously to herself--were to enable England to build up her great
+Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough
+to make the match desirable.
+
+Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662,
+Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at
+Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall--he stood a full
+six feet high--lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his drawn,
+harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded,
+dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was
+as graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an
+indolent good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.
+
+Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife
+they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of
+an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs that,
+dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale, she had
+the appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him. Her
+complexion was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were fine,
+they were not fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her
+black hair was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great
+ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a pair of
+miniature wings.
+
+It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary,
+with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long
+stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
+
+"Lord!" was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. "They've
+brought me a bat, not a woman."
+
+But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in
+desperate need of money.
+
+"I suppose," he told Clarendon anon, "I must swallow this black draught
+to get the jam that goes with it."
+
+The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he
+coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume to
+rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile
+at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.
+
+Catherine was immediately attended--in the words of Grammont--by six
+frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was
+a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where
+the honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor
+woman--entirely enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had
+married--lived in a fool's paradise.
+
+Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of
+her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King
+Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives de facto Charles
+would people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present wife de
+facto, the mistress of his heart, the first lady of his harem, was that
+beautiful termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger
+Palmer, Earl of Castle-maine.
+
+There was no lack--there never is in such cases--of those who out of
+concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil for her,
+and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's association with my
+Lady Castle-maine--an association dating back to the time when he was
+still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge would appear to have troubled
+the poor soul profoundly; but the climax of her distress was reached
+when, on her coming to Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of
+ladies-in-waiting assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The
+forlorn little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
+that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not to be
+admitted to her presence.
+
+But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered,
+debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature,
+manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation.
+Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife's
+presence, before the whole Court assembled, and himself presented her
+to Catherine, what time that Court, dissolute and profligate as it was,
+looked on in amazement at so outrageous a slight to the dignity of a
+queen.
+
+What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
+stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually her
+face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged pride and
+mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if something snapped within
+her brain under this stress of bitter emotion, blood gushed from her
+nostrils, and she sank back in a swoon into the arms of her Portuguese
+ladies.
+
+Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light of
+love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy skill in
+handling delicate situations could avail him to save his royal dignity.
+
+Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was his
+wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established as one of
+the Queen's ladies--or, rather, since it was her ladyship's wish, and
+since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's hands--it became necessary to
+have the Queen instructed in what was, in her husband's view, fitting.
+For this task he selected Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long
+and loyally played Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide
+him in matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.
+
+Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated with
+Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his Majesty was
+bent.
+
+"Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who shall not
+be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel at her decision in
+this instance."
+
+"Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be revoked."
+
+"By whom, sire?" the Chancellor asked him gravely.
+
+"By her Majesty, of course."
+
+"Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument," said
+Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the
+latter's boyhood. "Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did
+not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you
+are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for
+thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have
+forgotten the things you said then of King Louis."
+
+Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
+invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in
+check.
+
+But anon--no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady
+Castlemaine--he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his
+orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience.
+
+"Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I am sure
+my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady
+Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his
+enemy so long as I live."
+
+My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew
+his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a variety of
+conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that
+Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest
+as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line:
+"Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do
+promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless
+he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that
+he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into
+oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.
+
+Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious
+embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used
+arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to
+himself.
+
+That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys,
+tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk
+of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in
+the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it
+were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.
+
+You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
+Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
+husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
+affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
+Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he
+dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning
+upon her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater
+disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would
+submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.
+
+Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail, prevail
+it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and submitted. And a
+very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was not only installed
+as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find the Queen treating
+her with a friendliness that provoked comment and amazement.
+
+The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
+insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of
+whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware.
+Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is
+inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more
+because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of
+her hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies,
+members of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere
+Chancellor was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked
+to pull him down.
+
+The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain--for
+Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor's
+value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to
+work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance--most
+fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my
+lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to
+my Lord Clarendon's gatepost:
+
+
+                    Three sights to be seen:
+             Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
+
+Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
+Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable
+as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows
+that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to
+mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her how insecure is the
+tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice
+to existence.
+
+And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a
+day when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal lover,
+when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part she owed
+it to an indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure to a child
+of sixteen, of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature
+that still found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of
+a quick and lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either
+by the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was become
+the toast of the day.
+
+This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly come
+to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an impression
+her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys you may
+study in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in the Park
+with the King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine,
+looking, as he tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when
+Miss Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
+she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found its way
+into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more perdurable than
+that of any actual queen) in the figure of Britannia, for which she was
+the model.
+
+Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances
+in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in
+that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to
+inquire whether he were above or below--"below" meaning Miss Stewart's
+apartments on the ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his
+Majesty was a constant visitor. And since where the King goes the Court
+follows, and where the King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted
+that this child now found herself queening it over a court that flocked
+to her apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
+gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
+
+About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
+iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled
+head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
+Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white,
+jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of
+gold that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the game.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played
+in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is
+true, some Ł1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came
+easily by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet
+preserve her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She
+played recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding
+eyes of hers were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of
+the long room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
+gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a vastly
+different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose she could
+find for cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with
+the assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his
+Grace of Buckingham, who was as skilled in this as in other equally
+unstable forms of architecture.
+
+Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather, lounged the
+King, languidly observing this smaller party, a faint, indolent smile on
+his swarthy, saturnine countenance. Absently, with one hand he stroked
+a little spaniel that was curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous,
+plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold--there were
+three or four such attendants about the room--proffered him a cup of
+posset on a golden salver.
+
+The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel
+under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table. Soon he found
+himself alone with her--the others having removed themselves on his
+approach, as jackals fall back before the coming of the lion. The last
+to go, and with signs of obvious reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond,
+a delicately-built, uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
+
+Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards standing
+between them.
+
+Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
+architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled down to a
+mere heap of cards again.
+
+"Symbol of kingly power," said Miss, pertly. "You demolish better than
+you build, sire."
+
+"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong," quoth
+he.
+
+"Pray do. The cards are here."
+
+"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But such is
+not the castle I'll build you if you command me."
+
+"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
+surely."
+
+"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes were oddly
+ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"
+
+Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
+distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
+
+"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
+prove a prison."
+
+She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome, scowling
+eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine looks as if she
+feared that fortune were not favouring her." She was so artless that
+Charles could not be sure there was a double meaning to her speech.
+"Shall we go see how she is faring?" she added, with a disregard for
+etiquette, whose artlessness he also doubted.
+
+He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially with
+beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic urbanity
+with which he sauntered beside her across the room was no more than a
+mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that pretty Frances Stewart
+used him. She always knew how to elude him and, always with that cursed
+air of artlessness, uttered seemingly simple sentences that clung to his
+mind to tantalize him.
+
+"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must prove
+a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to queen before
+she would allow him to build a castle for her?
+
+It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew there
+was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon, which, fearing
+the succession of the former, and, so, of the grandchildren of the
+latter, as a result of Catherine of Braganza's childlessness, strongly
+favoured the King's divorce.
+
+It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be largely
+responsible for the existence of that party. In her hatred for
+Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would slay the
+Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least helped to give
+currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had deliberately chosen for
+Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure the ultimate succession of his
+own daughter's children. But she had never thought to see that slander
+recoil upon her as it now did; she had never thought that a party would
+come to rise up in consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at
+the very moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
+artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
+
+It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that party's
+mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as perhaps it
+did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed. He looked at
+Buckingham, frowning.
+
+"I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England."
+
+The impudent gallant made a leg. "For a subject, sire, I believe I am."
+
+Charles--with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
+compelling than the serious--laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then he
+sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
+
+"It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because
+she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no fault of hers."
+
+He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature shrank
+from purchasing his desires at the price of so much ignominy to the
+Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be necessary to give the
+screw of temptation another turn or two. And it was Miss Stewart herself
+who--in all innocence--supplied what was required in that direction.
+Driven to bay by the importunities of Charles, she announced at last
+that it was her intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve
+herself from the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine
+the uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
+occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so desperate had
+she been rendered that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year who would have her in honour.
+
+You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to bribe
+her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or any title she
+coveted, offering her these things at the nation's expense as freely
+and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into her lap, or the collar
+of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he had put about her neck. The
+offers were ineffectual, and Charles, driven almost to distraction
+by such invulnerable virtue, might now have yielded to the insidious
+whispers of divorce and re-marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a
+hand in the game.
+
+Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
+infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a
+neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered with
+bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the Chancellor had
+recoiled upon herself.
+
+In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost dead, she
+made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the ineffable Chiffinch,
+Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio,
+who was her ladyship's friend, made it and communicated it to her
+There had been one ardent respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that
+proclamation of Miss Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of
+fifteen hundred pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here
+his opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in constant
+attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared the King's
+displeasure.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well served in
+the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came one cold night
+towards the end of February of that year 1667. Charles, going below at a
+late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when he judged that she would be
+alone, was informed by her maid that Miss was not receiving, a headache
+compelling her to keep her room.
+
+His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
+confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine. Chiffinch had
+introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles stiffened at sight
+of her.
+
+"I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage," says she, on a note of
+irony, "although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me at my own
+house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction and grief into
+which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart has reduced your
+Majesty."
+
+"You are pleased to be amused, ma'am," says Charles frostily.
+
+"I will not," she returned him, "make use of reproaches which would
+disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse frailties in
+myself which nothing can justify, since your constancy for me deprives
+me of all defence." Her ladyship, you see, had a considerable gift of
+sarcasm.
+
+"In that case, may I ask you why you have come?"
+
+"To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made the
+jest of your own Court."
+
+"Madam!"
+
+"Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at for
+the gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the Stewart's
+affectations, any more than you know that whilst you are denied
+admittance to her apartments, under the presence of some indisposition,
+the Duke of Richmond is with her now."
+
+"That is false," he was beginning, very indignantly.
+
+"I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow me,
+you will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes you act so
+ridiculous a part."
+
+She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence led him,
+despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately come. Outside
+her rival's door she left him, but she paused at the end of the gallery
+to make sure that he had entered.
+
+Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
+chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them informing him
+scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been very ill since his
+Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she was, God be thanked, in a
+very fine sleep.
+
+"That I must see," said the King. And, since one of the women placed
+herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty unceremoniously
+took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
+
+He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony into the
+well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the handsome, canopied bed.
+But far from being as he had been told, in "a very fine sleep," she was
+sitting up; and far from presenting an ailing appearance, she looked
+radiantly well and very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with
+golden ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
+sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved upon
+scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
+
+The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid eyes
+lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might have expected
+that he would now deliver himself with that sneering sarcasm, that
+indolent cynicism, which he used upon occasion. But he was too deeply
+stirred for acting. His self-control deserted him entirely. Exactly what
+he said has not been preserved for us. All that we are told is that he
+signified his resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and
+that his Grace, almost petrified by the King's most royal rage, uttered
+never a word in answer. The windows of the room overlooked the Thames.
+The King's eyes strayed towards them. Richmond was slight of build,
+Charles vigorous and athletic. His Grace took the door betimes lest the
+window should occur to his Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with
+the outraged monarch.
+
+Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss Stewart
+faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own, and she was very
+far from attempting any such justification of herself, or her conduct,
+as he may have expected.
+
+"Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your complaint?"
+she invited him challengingly.
+
+That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn. His jaw
+fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this she took the
+fullest advantage.
+
+"If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
+Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am a slave
+in a free country. I know of no engagement that should prevent me from
+disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this is not permitted me in
+your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe there is any power on earth
+can prevent me going back to France, and throwing myself into a convent,
+there to enjoy the peace denied me at this Court."
+
+With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was complete. On
+his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury he had done her. But
+Miss was not in a forgiving humour.
+
+"If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in peace,"
+said she, "you would avoid offending by a longer visit those who
+accompanied or conducted you to my apartments."
+
+She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went home.
+Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak to her
+again, he stalked out.
+
+Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he must
+also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and that in his
+conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely ridiculous. She was
+rightly resolved against being lightly worn by any man. If anything, the
+reflection must have fanned his passion. It was impossible, he thought,
+that she should love that knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no
+graces either of body or of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit,
+it must be, as she had all but said, so that she might be delivered from
+the persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought of
+her marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to Charles,
+and it may have stifled his last scruple in the matter of the divorce.
+
+His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the Court.
+But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The King's messenger
+found him gone already.
+
+Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
+Clarendon's habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke to the
+King--taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary position in which for
+the last twenty-five years he had stood to him--much as he had spoken
+when Charles had proposed to make Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's
+Bedchamber, saving that he was now even more uncompromising. The King
+was not pleased with him. But just as he had had his way, despite the
+Chancellor, in that other matter, so he would have his way despite him
+now. This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too
+much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no effort
+to avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured Queen. So he
+went secretly to work to outwit the King. He made himself the protector
+of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and Miss Stewart, with the result
+that one dark night, a week or two later, the lady stole away from
+the Palace of Whitehall, and made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the
+Bridge-foot, Westminster, where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And
+so, by the secret favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent
+and matrimony.
+
+That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of things in
+his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks later that he
+learnt by whose agency the thing had been accomplished. He learnt it,
+not a doubt, from my Lady Castlemaine.
+
+The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated back to
+the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was at last
+made up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant, and firmly
+established in the amorous King's affections. She had cause to
+be grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her vindictive nature
+remembered only the earlier injury still unavenged. Here at last was her
+chance to pay off that score. Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand,
+yet trusting in the King whom he had served so well, stood his ground
+unintimidated and unmoved--an oak that had weathered mightier storms
+than this. He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil woman.
+And that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told the King
+of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest the King
+should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of consideration for his
+motives, represented him as a self-seeker, and charged him with having
+acted thus so as to make sure of keeping his daughter's children by the
+Duke of York in the succession.
+
+That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw Clarendon to
+the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him with a command that he
+should surrender his seals of office. The proud old man refused to yield
+his seals to any but the King himself. He may have hoped that the memory
+of all that lay between them would rise up once more when they were face
+to face. So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
+deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile throng of
+courtiers--"especially the buffoones and ladys of pleasure," as Evelyn
+says.
+
+Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has left us
+a vivid picture:
+
+"When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine was
+in bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her smock into her
+aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither her woman brought her
+her nightgown; and she stood, blessing herself at the old man's going
+away; and several of the gallants of Whitehall--of which there were many
+staying to see the Chancellor's return--did talk to her in her birdcage;
+among others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of passage."
+
+Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine house in
+Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered Strafford's
+fate, and set out to tread once more and for the remainder of his days
+the path of exile.
+
+Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--reigned
+successively as queens in England.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+
+Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+
+He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
+particularly in England, where he had been associated with his brother
+in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century did not
+look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it
+condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip Christof Königsmark for
+the sake of his personal beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his
+magnificent address. The court of Hanover made him warmly welcome,
+counting itself the richer for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was
+retained there by the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he
+had been appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
+Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who later
+was to reign in England as King George I.
+
+His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had been
+playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where Königsmark had been
+brought up. With adolescence he had gone out into the world to seek the
+broader education which it offered to men of quality and spirit. He had
+fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure
+wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him like an aura.
+Thus Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence
+shone the more brightly against the dull background of that gross
+Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of the
+world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
+
+The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a different
+kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been married in 1682, at
+the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years of wedded life to the
+fulfilment of the handsome promise of her maidenhood. But her beauty was
+spiritualized by a certain wistfulness that had not been there before,
+that should not have been there now had all been well. The sprightliness
+inherent in her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
+bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
+to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a little
+reckless of how or where it offended.
+
+Königsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and knew
+enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her thwarted love
+for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted for the sake of
+dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying her to the Electoral
+Prince George the whole of the Duchy of Luneberg might be united.
+Thus, for political reasons, she had been thrust into a union that was
+mutually loveless; for Prince George had as little affection to bring to
+it as herself. Yet for a prince the door to compensations is ever open.
+Prince George's taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and
+this taste he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness
+towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was eventually
+converted into disgust and contempt.
+
+Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on her
+side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by his
+father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the latter by
+the Countess von Platen.
+
+Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of state,
+was--with the connivance of her despicable husband, who saw therein
+the means to his own advancement--the acknowledged mistress of Ernest
+Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and ill-favoured woman.
+Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted face, and peered from her
+mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the Elector Ernest loved her. His son's
+taste for ugly women would appear to have been hereditary.
+
+Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The princess
+had mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not only had she
+never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that detestable woman
+inspired in her, but she had actually given it such free and stinging
+expression as had provoked against Madame von Platen the derision of
+the court, a derision so ill-concealed that echoes of it had reached its
+object, and made her aware of the source from whence it sprang.
+
+It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the elegant,
+romantic Königsmark took place. He found the stage set for comedy of
+a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by his recklessness, to
+convert into tragedy.
+
+It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him. It was
+some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he did not lack
+for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-esteem that blinded him
+here to the appalling truth. Yet in the end understanding came to
+him. When the precise significance of the fond leer of that painted
+harridan's repellent coquetry was borne in upon him he felt the skin of
+his body creep and roughen But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal
+scamp, after all, and in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to
+employ his gifts and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as
+to win to eminence. He saw that the Elector's favourite could be of use
+to him; and it is not your adventurer's way to look too closely into the
+nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.
+
+Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so long as
+her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility detrimental. But
+once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was firmly in his grasp,
+and an intimate friendship had ripened between himself and Prince
+Charles--the Elector's younger son--sufficiently to ensure his future,
+he plucked off the mask and allied himself with Sophia in her hostility
+towards Madame von Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter,
+whilst on a visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups
+a droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at Madame
+von Platen's hands.
+
+It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But there was
+one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the Countess, and you
+conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused in her. Her rage was the
+greater for being stifled. It was obviously impossible for her to appeal
+to her lover, the Elector, to avenge her. From the Elector, above all
+others, must the matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would
+she forgo the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere
+all was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer who
+had flouted her be made to pay.
+
+The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more or less
+directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite against Sophia.
+This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into the arms of the Electoral
+Prince. Melusina, who was years afterwards to be created Duchess
+of Kendal, had not yet attained to that completeness of lank, bony
+hideousness that was later to distinguish her in England. But even in
+youth she could boast of little attraction. Prince George, however,
+was easily attracted. A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to
+over-eating, heavy drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina
+von Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as maîtresse en-titre
+took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at Herrenhausen, a
+ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.
+
+Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her dullard
+husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her contempt of him now
+left her, yet in the affront thus publicly offered her, she felt that
+the limit of endurance had been reached. Next day it was found that she
+had disappeared from Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at
+Zell.
+
+But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom and
+levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the dignity
+of her rank; recommended her to use in future greater prudence, and a
+proper, wifely submission; and, the homily delivered, packed her back to
+her husband at Herrenhausen.
+
+George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She had
+been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of respect for
+him. She must learn what was due to her station, and to her husband. He
+would thank her to instruct herself in these matters against his return
+from Berlin, whither he was about to journey, and he warned her that he
+would suffer no more tantrums of that kind.
+
+Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
+frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
+
+Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him, and
+leaving hate and despair behind.
+
+It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a true
+friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to rescue her from
+her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her elbow, against this
+dreadful need, Destiny had placed her sometime playmate, her most
+devoted friend--as she accounted him, and as, indeed, he was--the
+elegant, reckless Königsmark, with his beautiful face, his golden mane,
+and his unfathomable blue eyes.
+
+Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the formal
+gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and ungraceful as those
+who had built and who inhabited it--she opened her heart to him very
+fully, allowed him, in her overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things
+which for very shame she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She
+kept nothing back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish
+husband, told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
+had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had beaten
+her upon occasion.
+
+Königsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of his
+emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when she came at
+last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
+
+"It is enough, madame," he cried. "I swear to you, as Heaven hears me,
+that he shall be punished."
+
+"Punished?" she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him with
+a smile of sad incredulity. "It is not his punishment I seek, my friend,
+but my own salvation."
+
+"The one can be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly, and
+struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of this lout
+as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to Berlin to-night."
+
+The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell apart, as
+she looked at him aghast.
+
+"Why, what would you do? What do you mean?" she asked him.
+
+"I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of you,
+madame."
+
+She shook her head. "Princes do not fight," she said, on a note of
+contempt.
+
+"I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative--unless, indeed,
+he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put an affront
+on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have made him valiant
+enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even that will not answer, and
+he still shields himself behind his rank--why, there are other ways to
+serve him." He was thinking, perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
+
+The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed the
+poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy, and
+starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
+
+"My friend, my friend!" she cried, on a note that quivered and broke.
+"You are mad--wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What would become of
+you if you did this?"
+
+He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
+gesture. "Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become of
+you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service being
+rendered..." He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands and let them
+fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He was the complete
+courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic preux-chevalier all in one.
+
+She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat in her
+white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful face. If ever
+she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss Königsmark in that
+moment, but as she might have kissed a loving brother, in token of her
+deep gratitude for his devotion to her who had known so little true
+devotion.
+
+"If you knew," she said, "what balsam this proof of your friendship has
+poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would understand my utter lack of
+words in which to thank you. You dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no
+expression for my gratitude."
+
+"I ask no gratitude," quoth he. "I am all gratitude myself that you
+should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask your leave to
+serve you in my own way."
+
+She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
+
+He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. "Serve me if you
+will--God knows I need the service of a loyal friend--but serve me as I
+shall myself decide--no other way."
+
+"But what alternative service can exist?" he asked, almost impatiently.
+
+"I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place--to quit Hanover,
+never to return."
+
+"But to go whither?"
+
+"Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this hateful
+life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find shelter at Zell,
+as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought of my children, I
+should have fled long ago. For the sake of those two little ones I have
+suffered patiently through all these years. But the limit of endurance
+has been reached and passed. Take me away. Königsmark!" She was
+clutching his lapels again. "If you would really serve me, help me to
+escape."
+
+His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
+breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden kindling
+of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones. These sensitive,
+romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion, ever ready to yield to
+the adventure of it.
+
+"My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Königsmark while he has
+life." Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still holding them, he
+bowed low over them, so low that his heavy golden mane tumbled forward
+on either side of his handsome head to form a screen under cover of
+which he pressed his lips upon her fingers.
+
+She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough reward
+for so much devotion.
+
+"I thank you again," she breathed. "And now I must think--I must
+consider where I can count upon finding refuge."
+
+That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion was, no
+doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of his horse, and so
+ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom for her with his sword.
+Her sober words dispelled the dream, revealed to him that it was not
+quite intended he should hereafter be her custodian. And there for the
+moment the matter was suspended.
+
+Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered that
+an Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted interview,
+accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-kissings, within
+sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it happened, behind one of
+those windows lurked the Countess von Platen, watching them jealously,
+and without any disposition to construe the meeting innocently. Was she
+not the deadly enemy of both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon
+her, and had not Königsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and
+then unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth of
+profligates?
+
+That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the Elector.
+
+"Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour in his
+absence?"
+
+"George's honour?" quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
+Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the notion of
+guarding something whose existence was not easily discerned. He had no
+sense of humour, as his appearance suggested. He was a short, fat man
+with a face shaped like a pear--narrow in the brow and heavy in the
+jowl. "What the devil do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"I mean that this foreign adventurer, Königsmark, and Sophia grow too
+intimate."
+
+"Sophia!" Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the line of
+his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent creases expressive
+of contempt.
+
+"That white-faced ninny! Bah!" Her very virtue was matter for his scorn.
+
+"It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly," replied the Countess,
+out of her worldly wisdom. "Listen a moment now." And she related, with
+interest rather than discount, you may be sure, what she had witnessed
+that afternoon.
+
+The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia, and he
+felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to Zell. Then, too,
+being a libertine, and the father of a libertine, it logically followed
+that unchastity in his women-folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.
+
+He heaved himself out of his deep chair. "How far has this gone?" he
+demanded.
+
+Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that might
+afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need, if she could
+trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would presently afford her all
+the evidence required to damn the pair. She said as much, and promised
+the Elector that she would exercise herself the latter quality in his
+son's service. Again the Elector did not find it grotesque that his
+mistress should appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.
+
+The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal--though George's
+honour was the least thing that concerned her. What concerned her was
+the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of Königsmark. So she watched
+assiduously, and set others, too, to watch for her and to report. And
+almost daily now she had for the Elector a tale of whisperings and
+hand-pressings, and secret stolen meetings between the guilty twain.
+The Elector enraged, and would have taken action, but that the guileful
+Countess curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could
+not be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the offenders,
+might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing the Duke of Zell to
+his daughter's aid. So they must wait yet awhile until they held more
+absolute proof of this intrigue.
+
+And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the Elector with
+word that Königsmark and the Princess had shut themselves up together
+in the garden pavilion. Let him come at once, and he should so discover
+them for himself, and thus at last be able to take action. The Countess
+was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent--and Madame
+von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she
+had seen, conceive it innocent--it was in an Electoral Princess an
+unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none
+would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried
+off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late,
+despite the diligence of his spy.
+
+Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been a
+brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in all
+particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her cousin, the
+Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure--for the sake of what once had
+lain between them--would not now refuse to shelter and protect her. Of
+Königsmark she desired that he should act as her escort to her cousin's
+court.
+
+Königsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing that
+he regretted. At Wolfenbuttel, having served Sophia faithfully, his
+ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find expression. She would
+make all dispositions, and advise him when she was ready to set out.
+But they must use caution, for they were being spied upon. Madame von
+Platen's over-eagerness had in part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their
+consciousness of espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting
+in the seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
+Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
+
+The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his hands, his
+eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when Ernest Augustus
+burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen lingering just beyond the
+threshold. The Elector's face was apoplectically purple from rage and
+haste, his breath came in wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept
+round the chamber, and fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled
+Königsmark.
+
+"Where is the Princess?" he blurted out.
+
+The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had the
+scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of innocent
+mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
+
+"Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?"
+
+At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance over his
+shoulder at the Countess.
+
+"I was told that her Highness was here," he said.
+
+"Plainly," said Königsmark, with perfect calm, "you have been
+misinformed." And his quiet glance and gesture invited the Elector to
+look round for himself.
+
+"How long have you been here yourself?" Feeling at a disadvantage, the
+Elector avoided the direct question that was in his mind.
+
+"Half an hour at least."
+
+"And in that time you have not seen the Princess?"
+
+"Seen the Princess?" Königsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. "I
+scarcely understand your Highness."
+
+The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked down,
+then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's glove.
+
+"What's this?" quoth he. "Whose glove is this?"
+
+If Königsmark's heart missed a beat--as well it may have done--he did
+not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost laughed.
+
+"Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me questions
+that only a seer could answer."
+
+The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously suspicious
+glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid, one of Sophia's
+women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
+
+"What do you want?" the Elector snapped at her.
+
+"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer,
+innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had been too
+hastily dispatched to avert.
+
+The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
+laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to Königsmark.
+
+"You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an honest
+man. Will you now tell me without any more of this, precisely what the
+Princess Sophia was doing here with you?"
+
+Königsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the furnace of
+the Elector's face.
+
+"Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a prince
+is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady whose spotless
+purity is beyond his understanding. But your Highness can hardly expect
+me to become in never so slight a degree a party to that insult by
+vouchsafing any answer to your question."
+
+"That is your last word, sir?" The Elector shook with suppressed anger.
+
+"Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?"
+
+The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust forth in
+scorn and menace.
+
+"You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard, and as
+that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no reason why your
+sojourn here should be protracted."
+
+Königsmark bowed stiffly, formally. "It shall end, your Highness, as
+soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my departure--in a
+week at most."
+
+"You are accorded three days, sir." The Elector turned, and waddled
+out, leaving Königsmark to breathe freely again. The three days should
+suffice for the Princess also. It was very well.
+
+The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given this
+troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and placed his
+daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von Platen was the only
+one concerned who thought that it was not well at all, the consummation
+being far from that which she had desired. She had dreamt of a flaming
+scandal, that should utterly consume her two enemies, Sophia and
+Königsmark. Instead, she saw them both escaping, and the fact that she
+was--as she may have supposed--effectively separating two loving hearts
+could be no sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
+Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more germane to
+her desires.
+
+The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet confident that
+at worst she could justify it, and little fearing that the worst would
+happen, she boldly went to work. She forged next day a brief note in
+which the Princess Sophia urgently bade Königsmark to come to her at
+ten o'clock that night in her own apartments, and with threat and bribe
+induced the waiting woman of the glove to bear that letter.
+
+Now it so happened that Königsmark, through the kind offices of Sophia's
+maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in the secret of
+their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that morning, briefly
+stating the urgency of departure, and begging her so to arrange that she
+could leave Herrenhausen with him on the morrow. He imagined the note
+now brought him to be in answer to that appeal of his. Its genuineness
+he never doubted, being unacquainted with Sophia's writing. He was
+aghast at the rashness which dictated such an assignation, yet never
+hesitated as to keeping it. It was not his way to hesitate. He trusted
+to the gods who watch over the destinies of the bold.
+
+And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with having
+dealt too softly with the Dane.
+
+"Bah!" said the Elector. "To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are rid of
+him. Is not that enough?"
+
+"Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already," quoth she.
+
+"Now what will you be hinting?" he asked her peevishly.
+
+"I'll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this. Königsmark
+has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this very night at ten
+o'clock--and where do you suppose? In her Highness's own apartments."
+
+The Elector came to his feet with an oath. "That is not true!" he cried.
+"It cannot be!"
+
+"Then I'll say no more," quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin lips.
+
+"Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it suffice
+you that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing this profligate
+you have sufficiently avenged the honour of your son."
+
+"My God, if I thought this were true...." He choked with rage, stood
+shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
+
+"The truth is easily ascertained," said Madame. "Conceal yourself in the
+Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best go attended,
+for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been known aforetime to
+practice murder."
+
+Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men
+together, Königsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's
+antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her Highness
+of his visit. Sophia had already retired to bed, and the amazing
+announcement of the Count's presence there startled her into a fear of
+untoward happenings. She was overwhelmed, too, by the rashness of this
+step of his, coming after the events of yesterday. If it should be known
+that he had visited her thus, terrible consequences might ensue. She
+rose, and with Mademoiselle de Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive
+him. Yet for all that she made haste, the precious irreclaimable moments
+sped.
+
+She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
+propriety's sake.
+
+"What is it?" she asked him breathlessly. "What brings you here at such
+an hour?"
+
+"What brings me?" quoth he, surprised at that reception. "Why, your
+commands--your letter."
+
+"My letter? What letter?"
+
+A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He plucked
+forth the treacherous note, and proffered it.
+
+"Why, what does this mean?" She swept a white hand over her eyes and
+brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her vision. "That is
+not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream I should be imprudent as
+to bid you hither, and at such an hour How could you dream it?"
+
+"You are right," said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm,
+perhaps in sheer bitter mirth. "It will be, no doubt, the work of
+our friend, Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest, my
+travelling chaise will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow by the
+Markt Kirck in Hanover, and I shall wait within it. I shall hope to
+conduct you safely to Wolfenbuttel."
+
+"I will come, I will come. But go now--oh, go!"
+
+He looked very deeply into her eyes--a valedictory glance against the
+worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and kissed it,
+and so departed.
+
+He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of stairs,
+and pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He passed
+through, and thrust the door behind him, then stood a moment looking
+round the vast apartment. If he was too late to avoid the springs of
+the baited trap, it was here that they should snap upon him. Yet all was
+still. A single lamp on a table in the middle of the vast chamber shed
+a feeble, flickering light, yet sufficient to assure him that no one
+waited here. He sighed relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set out
+swiftly to cross the hall.
+
+But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the tall
+stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after him.
+
+He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged his
+sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the man who
+for ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to depend upon his
+blade. That swift action sealed his doom. Their orders were to take him
+living or dead, and standing in awe of his repute, they were not the men
+to incur risks. Even as he came on guard, a partisan grazed his head,
+and another opened his breast.
+
+He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright golden
+hair, and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat, yet his right
+hand still desperately clutching his useless sword.
+
+His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike again,
+and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he suddenly beheld
+the Countess von Platen materializing out of the surrounding shadows as
+it seemed, and behind her the squat, ungraceful figure of the Elector.
+He fought for breath. "I am slain," he gasped, "and as I am to appear
+before my Maker I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is innocent.
+Spare her at least, your Highness."
+
+"Innocent!" said the Elector hoarsely. "Then what did you now in her
+apartments?
+
+"It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who..."
+
+The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the lips of
+the dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the halberts finished
+him off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the floor of
+the Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen, which was
+long to remain imbrued with his blood.
+
+Thus miserably perished the glittering Königsmark, a martyr to his own
+irrepressible romanticism.
+
+As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his fate
+that night. She was placed under arrest next morning, and Prince George
+was summoned back from Berlin at once.
+
+The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not suffered,
+for he was disposed to let the matter drop, content that they should
+remain in the forbidding relations which had existed between them before
+this happening. But Sophia was uncompromising in her demand for strict
+justice.
+
+"If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you," she told him. "If innocent, you
+are unworthy of me."
+
+There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
+divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no faintest
+evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content to pronounce the
+divorce upon the ground of her desertion.
+
+She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in vain.
+She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on the Ahlen, to
+drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-two years of life.
+
+Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that on her
+death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to her sometime
+husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months later, as King
+George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that letter was placed
+in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into Germany. It contained
+Sophia's dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn summons to King
+George to stand by her side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a
+year, and there make answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done
+her, for her blighted life and her miserable death.
+
+King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading of
+that letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died in his
+carriage next day--the 9th of June, 1727--on the road to Osnabruck.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
+
+Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her lover in
+the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word--for he never so much
+as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of his existence.
+
+The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld her in
+the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting corollary to her
+action. She in her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil
+martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism and his exultant martyrdom
+upon the altar of Love were alike splendidly futile.
+
+It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It has its
+pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no might-have-been
+which death had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her; because he
+loved her, he died. That is all, but for the details which I am now to
+give you.
+
+The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter of a
+landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chétive noblesse, a man
+of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him
+against the law of entail or primogeniture--the prime cause of the
+inequality out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted
+France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest
+converts to Republicanism--the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding
+constitutional government of the people by the people, holding
+monarchical and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
+
+From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican doctrines to
+which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she rejoiced when the hour
+of awakening sounded and the children of France rose up and snapped the
+fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries by an insolent
+minority of their fellow-countrymen.
+
+In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a transient
+phase--horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion of that
+awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government of
+her dreams would follow--must follow, since among the people's elected
+representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of
+her father's class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by
+a lofty altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party
+presently to be known as the Girondins.
+
+But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least another.
+And this other in the National Assembly was that of the Jacobins,
+less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party in which
+stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as Robespierre,
+Danton,--and Marat.
+
+Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for
+Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned Marat
+and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and thereby
+precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat was
+the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of
+twenty-nine deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled into
+the country, hoping to raise an army that should yet save France, and
+several of the fugitives made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and
+oratory they laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were
+gifted, able men, eloquent speakers and skilled writers, and they might
+have succeeded but that in Paris sat another man no less gifted, and
+with surer knowledge of the temper of the proletariat, tirelessly
+wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of inflaming the passions
+of the mob.
+
+That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime
+professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of
+St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works,
+inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and
+editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had
+bestowed upon him the name borne by his gazette, so that he was known as
+The People's Friend.
+
+Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian
+Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured,
+their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his
+vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine in Paris he spun with
+his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and
+threatened finally to choke them.
+
+He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in
+which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins
+he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of
+the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday--the friend and associate now of
+the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen--he loomed so
+vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young
+mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached
+by the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening
+to corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and
+to replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
+still.
+
+She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to raise an
+army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches of the Jacobins.
+An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw in it a sign that
+Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On the lips of her friends the
+Girondins she caught again the name of Marat, the murderer of Liberty;
+and, brooding, she reached a conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter
+which she wrote about that time.
+
+"As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the friends
+of law and humanity."
+
+From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent it
+was but a step. That step she took. She may have considered awhile the
+proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have come to her with
+realization. She understood that a great sacrifice was necessary; that
+who undertook to rid France of that unclean monster must go prepared for
+self-immolation. She counted the cost calmly and soberly--for calm and
+sober was now her every act.
+
+She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach from
+Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had written:
+
+"I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
+possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in France. On
+leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it I shall no longer
+be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of living together, as it has
+denied us other happinesses. May it show itself more clement to our
+country. Good-by, dear Father. Embrace my sister for me, and do not
+forget me."
+
+That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to
+save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should
+remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the
+Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold
+Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he
+corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the
+monster's death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at the
+hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified,
+she trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great
+tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
+of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
+
+You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of
+this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris
+diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic--1793, old
+style. She was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded
+across her well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown
+hair. She was of a good height and finely proportioned, and her carriage
+as full of dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness
+that a contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was
+gray-eyed, and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face
+squaring a little at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her
+habit, calm her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and
+calm the mind reflected in all this.
+
+And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the open
+country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the errand upon
+which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-receiving mission,
+can shake that normal calm. Here is no wild exaltation, no hysterical
+obedience to hotly-conceived impulse. Here is purpose, as cold as it
+is lofty, to liberate France and pay with her life for the privilege of
+doing so.
+
+That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared her
+ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan moved with
+pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations, sustained by the heady
+wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly indulged, towards a goal of
+triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly in the stuffy diligence with the
+quiet conviction that her days were numbered.
+
+So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one among
+them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous attentions, and
+actually proposed marriage to her before the coach had rolled over the
+bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days later.
+
+She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux Augustine, where
+she engaged a room on the first floor, and then she set out in quest of
+the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of introduction to him from the
+Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she had been on friendly terms at Caen.
+Duperret was to assist her to obtain an interview with the Minister of
+the Interior. She had undertaken to see the latter on the subject of
+certain papers relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an old convent
+friend of her own, and she was in haste to discharge this errand, so as
+to be free for the great task upon which she was come.
+
+From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was ill, and
+confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change of plans, and
+the relinquishing of her project of affording him a spectacular death in
+the crowded hall of the Convention.
+
+The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the business
+of her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose early, and by
+six o'clock she was walking in the cool gardens of the Palais Royal,
+considering with that almost unnatural calm of hers the ways and means
+of accomplishing her purpose in the unexpected conditions that she
+found.
+
+Towards eight o'clock, when Paris was awakening to the business of the
+day and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler's shop in the
+Palais Royal, and bought for two francs a stout kitchen knife in
+a shagreen case. She then returned to her hotel to breakfast, and
+afterwards, dressed in her brown travelling-gown and conical hat, she
+went forth again, and, hailing a hackney carriage, drove to Marat's
+house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine.
+
+But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The Citizen
+Marat was ill, she was told, and could receive no visitors. It was
+Simonne Everard, the triumvir's mistress--later to be known as the Widow
+Marat--who barred her ingress with this message.
+
+Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter to the
+triumvir:
+
+"Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic.
+
+"Citizen,--I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country leads
+me to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the unfortunate events
+which are taking place in that part of the Republic. I shall therefore
+call upon you towards one o'clock. Have the kindness to receive me, and
+accord me a moment's audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering a
+great service to France.
+
+"Marie Corday."
+
+Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late afternoon
+waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of receiving any, she
+wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
+
+"I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter? May I
+hope for a moment's audience? If you have received my letter, I hope you
+will not refuse me, considering the importance of the matter. It should
+suffice for you that I am very unfortunate to give me the right to your
+protection."
+
+Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown--you observe this further
+manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no departure from
+the ordinary habits of life--she goes forth to deliver in person this
+second letter, the knife concealed in the folds of the muslin fichu
+crossed high upon her breast.
+
+In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room of that
+house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, the People's Friend is seated
+in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he is obeying, for in all
+France there is no man more filthy in his person and his habits than
+this triumvir. His bath is medicated. The horrible, loathsome disease
+that corrodes his flesh demands these long immersions to quiet the
+gnawing pains which distract his active, restless mind. In these baths
+he can benumb the torment of the body with which he is encumbered.
+
+For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more--leastways, nothing more
+that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs
+he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of
+personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient
+sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at
+irregular intervals, all have their source in his contempt for
+the physical part of him. This talented man of varied attainments,
+accomplished linguist, skilled physician, able naturalist and profound
+psychologist, lives in his intellect alone, impatient of all physical
+interruptions. If he consents to these immersions, if he spends whole
+days seated in this medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or
+cools the fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend
+his mind to the work that is his life. But his long-suffering body is
+avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been submitted. The
+morbid condition of the former is being communicated to the latter,
+whence results that disconcerting admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and
+exalted sensibility which marked his nature in the closing years of his
+life.
+
+In his bath, then, sat the People's Friend on that July evening,
+immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his emaciated
+body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years of age, dying of
+consumption and other things, so that, did Charlotte but know it, there
+is no need to murder him. Disease and Death have marked him for their
+own, and grow impatient.
+
+A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty wooden
+box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of paper, and two or
+three copies of L'Ami do Peuple. There was no sound in the room but the
+scratch and splutter of his quill. He was writing diligently, revising
+and editing a proof of the forthcoming issue of his paper.
+
+A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in which he
+was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption, until it disturbed
+and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his bath, listened a moment,
+then, with intent to make an end of the interruption, he raised a
+hoarse, croaking voice to inquire what might be taking place.
+
+The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge, entered
+the room. She was fully twenty years younger than himself, and under the
+slattern appearance which life in that house had imposed upon her there
+were vestiges of a certain comeliness.
+
+"There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently to see
+you upon a matter of national importance."
+
+The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in that
+leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old foes of his,
+the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
+
+"She says," Simonne continued, "that she wrote a letter to you this
+morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have told her that
+you will not receive anyone, and..."
+
+"Give me the note," he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust out an
+unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne's hand. He spread
+it, and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his eyes narrowing to
+slits.
+
+"Let her in," he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him without more
+ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone together--the avenger
+and her victim. For a moment each regarded the other. Marat beheld
+a handsome young woman, elegantly attired. But these things had no
+interest for the People's Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of
+beauty? Charlotte beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and
+was full satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
+confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot out.
+
+Then Marat spoke. "So you are from Caen, child?" he said. "And what is
+doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?"
+
+She approached him.
+
+"Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat."
+
+"Rebellion, ha!" It was a sound between a laugh and a croak. "Tell me
+what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their names." He took
+up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
+
+She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him, erect
+and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the Girondins, whilst
+hunched there in his bath his pen scratched briskly.
+
+"So many for the guillotine," he snarled, when it was done.
+
+But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her fichu, and
+as he uttered those words of doom to others his own doom descended upon
+him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by that strong young arm, the
+long, stout blade was buried to its black hilt in his breast.
+
+He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as he
+sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
+
+"Help, chére amie! Help!" he cried, and was for ever silent.
+
+The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the bath at
+the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank sideways in the same
+direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon his right shoulder, whilst
+from the great rent in his breast the blood gushed forth, embruing
+the water of his bath, trickling to the brick-paved floor,
+bespattering--symbolically almost--a copy of L'Ami du Peuple, the
+journal to which he had devoted so much of his uneasy life.
+
+In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
+sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a tigress, she
+sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by the head, and calling
+loudly the while for assistance. Came instantly from the anteroom
+Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of the house, and Laurent Basse, a
+folder of Marat's paper; and now Charlotte found herself confronted
+by four maddened, vociferous beings, at whose hands she may well have
+expected to receive the death for which she was prepared.
+
+Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of it
+across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his fury to
+have battered her to death, but for the arrival of gens d'armes and the
+police commissioner of the district, who took her in their protecting
+charge.
+
+The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became known.
+All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the revolutionary
+rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch upon the house
+wherein the People's Friend lay dead.
+
+That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte Corday lay
+in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude the indignities
+that for a woman were almost inseparable from revolutionary
+incarceration. She preserved throughout her imperturbable calm, based
+now upon a state of mind content in the contemplation of accomplished
+purpose, duty done. She had saved France, she believed; saved Liberty,
+by slaying the man who would have strangled it. In that illusion she
+was content. Her own life was a small price to pay for the splendid
+achievement.
+
+Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her friends,
+in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she had done,
+expounding fully the motives that had impelled her, dwelling upon
+the details of the execution, and of all that had followed. Among the
+letters written by her during those "days of the preparation of peace
+"--as she calls that period, dating in such terms a long epistle to
+Barbaroux--was one to the Committee of Public Safety, in which she begs
+that a miniature-painter may be sent to her to paint her portrait, so
+that she may leave this token of remembrance to her friends. It is only
+in this, as the end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought
+for her own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
+instrument in the hands of Fate.
+
+On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began before the
+Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall as she appeared in
+her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and calm--always calm.
+
+The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of the
+cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
+
+"These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat."
+
+The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to examine
+her.
+
+"What was the object of your visit to Paris?" he asks.
+
+"To kill Marat."
+
+"What motives induced you to this horrible deed?"
+
+"His many crimes."
+
+"Of what crimes do you accuse him?"
+
+"That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive the
+fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator; that he sought
+to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by causing the arrest and
+imprisonment of the deputies to the Convention on May 31st."
+
+"What proof have you of this?"
+
+"The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a mask
+of patriotism."
+
+Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
+
+"Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+Montane shook his head. "You cannot convince anyone that a person of
+your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless instigated by
+some person or persons whom you are unwilling to name."
+
+Charlotte almost smiled. "That shows but a poor knowledge of the human
+heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the strength of
+one's own hatred than upon that of others." And then, raising her voice,
+she proclaimed: "I killed one man to save a hundred thousand; I killed
+a villain to save innocents; I killed a savage wild-beast to give repose
+to France. I was a Republican before the Revolution. I never lacked for
+energy."
+
+What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established. Her
+fearless self-obssession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-Tinville,
+the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her so virginal and
+fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal had not had the best
+of it, he sought with a handful of revolutionary filth to restore the
+balance. He rose slowly, his ferrety eyes upon her.
+
+"How many children have you had?" he rasped, sardonic, his tone a slur,
+an insult.
+
+Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed, disdainful, as
+she answered coldly:
+
+"Have I not stated that I am not married?"
+
+A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the impression he
+sought to convey, and he sat down again.
+
+It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed
+to defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had been
+intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering him to remain
+silent, another from the President bidding him declare her mad.
+
+Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable; it
+satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his client. It
+uttered the whole truth.
+
+"The prisoner," he said, "confesses with calm the horrible crime she has
+committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she confesses its
+most dreadful details; in short, she confesses everything, and does
+not seek to justify herself. That, citizens of the jury, is her whole
+defence. This imperturbable calm, this utter abnegation of self, which
+displays no remorse even in the very presence of death, are contrary
+to nature. They can only be explained by the excitement of political
+fanaticism which armed her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to
+judge what weight that moral consideration should have in the scales of
+justice."
+
+The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full sentence
+of the law.
+
+It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber
+of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but
+she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations.
+She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary
+Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in accordance with her
+request. And during the sitting, which lasted half an hour, she
+conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics, the tranquillity of
+her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death that was so swiftly
+approaching.
+
+The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He carried
+the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination. She showed no
+dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that the time spent with
+Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged for a few moments in
+which to write a note, and, the request being granted, acquitted herself
+briskly of that task, then announcing herself ready, she removed her
+cap that Sanson might cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking
+his scissors, she herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for
+remembrance. When Sanson would have bound her hands, she begged that she
+might be allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by
+the cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat's house. He answered
+that she might do so if she wished, but that it was unnecessary, as he
+could bind her without causing pain.
+
+"To be sure," she said, "those others had not your experience," and she
+proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further demur. "If this
+toilet of death is performed by rude hands," she commented, "at least it
+leads to immortality."
+
+She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and, disdaining
+the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to show herself
+dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce was that rage,
+indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that the tumbril proceeded
+at a crawl, and the people surging about the cart screamed death and
+insult at the doomed woman. It took two hours to reach the Place de la
+Révolution, and meanwhile a terrific summer thunderstorm had broken
+over Paris, and a torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed
+streets. Charlotte's garments were soaked through and through, so that
+her red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
+skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a reflection of
+the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her cheeks, and thus
+heightened her appearance of complete composure.
+
+And it is now in the Rue St. Honoré that at long last we reach the
+opening of our tragic love-story.
+
+A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux--sent to Paris by the
+city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention--was
+standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
+accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy
+and of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never practiced
+owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered anatomical
+work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted imagination,
+unhappily married--the not uncommon fate of such delicate
+temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had heard, as all
+Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of the trial, and he
+waited there, curious to see this woman, with whose deed he was secretly
+in sympathy.
+
+The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled up
+around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full of
+life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed upon her,
+standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of those about him,
+he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and paid homage to her. She
+did not see him. He had not thought that she would. He saluted her as
+the devout salute the unresponsive image of a saint. The tumbril crawled
+on. He turned his head, and followed her with his eyes for awhile; then,
+driving his elbows into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a
+passage through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
+gaze, a man entranced.
+
+He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he
+had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in
+the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice
+suddenly rang out.
+
+"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added, addressing
+those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were beautiful to have died
+with her!"
+
+He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that
+moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's attendant,
+who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped the cheek with
+his hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow.
+Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof
+that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.
+
+That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded with
+copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of Republicanism, the
+deliverer of France, in which occurs the comparison with Joan of Arc,
+that other great heroine of France. This was the work of Adam Lux.
+He made no secret of it. The vision of her had so wrought upon the
+imagination of this susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such
+enthusiasm, that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
+expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last moments
+of life she had inspired him.
+
+Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
+urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her act,
+placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately demanded
+for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in this manifesto
+that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term "tyrannicide." That
+document he boldly signed with his own name, realizing that he would pay
+for that temerity with his life.
+
+He was arrested on the 24th of July--exactly a week from the day on
+which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they exerted
+themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and release if he would
+publicly retract what he had written. But he laughed the proposal to
+scorn, ardently resolved to follow into death the woman who had aroused
+the hopeless, immaterial love that made his present torment.
+
+Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor named
+Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that the sight of
+Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a paper on this plea,
+recommending that clemency be shown to the young doctor on the score of
+his affliction, and that he should be sent to a hospital or to America.
+Adam Lux was angry when he heard of this, and protested indignantly
+against the allegations of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la
+Montagne, which published his declaration on the 26th of September, to
+the effect that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his
+anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his sanity.
+
+He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of October,
+when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it joyously, in a mood of
+exultation at his approaching deliverance. He assured the court that he
+did not fear the guillotine, and that all ignominy had been removed from
+such a death by the pure blood of Charlotte.
+
+They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.
+
+"Forgive me, sublime Charlotte," he exclaimed, "if I should find it
+impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness that were
+yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right that the adored
+should be above the adorer."
+
+Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers had
+been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic exaltation. At five
+o'clock that same afternoon he stepped from the tumbril under the gaunt
+shadow of the guillotine. He turned to the people, his eyes bright, a
+flush on his cheeks.
+
+"At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte," he told
+them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the bridegroom on
+his way to the nuptial altar.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights
+Entertainment, Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ***
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diff --git a/old/7949-8.zip b/old/7949-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ece314
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+++ b/old/7949-8.zip
diff --git a/old/7949-h.htm.2021-01-26 b/old/7949-h.htm.2021-01-26
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+++ b/old/7949-h.htm.2021-01-26
@@ -0,0 +1,10115 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second
+Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+
+Author: Rafael Sabatini
+
+Release Date: March 5, 2009 [EBook #7949]
+Last Updated: March 10, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by J. C. Byers, Abdulh Ameed Alhassan, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Rafael Sabatini
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To David Whitelaw
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My Dear David,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the narratives collected here as well as in the preceding volume
+      under the title of the Historical Nights Entertainment&mdash;narratives
+      originally published in The Premier Magazine, which you so ably edit&mdash;owe
+      their being to your suggestion, it is fitting that some acknowledgment of
+      the fact should be made. To what is hardly less than a duty, allow me to
+      add the pleasure of dedicating to you, in earnest of my friendship and
+      esteem, not merely this volume, but the work of which this volume is the
+      second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sincerely yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rafael Sabatini
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      London, June, 1919.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> Preface </a><br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> I. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE ABSOLUTION
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> II. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> III. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> V. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE END OF THE &ldquo;VERT GALANT&rdquo;
+         </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE BARREN WOOING
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          SIR JUDAS
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VIII. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> IX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE PATH OF EXILE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> X. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          THE TYRANNICIDE
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Preface
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the Historical Nights
+      Entertainment, issued in December of 1917, has encouraged me to prepare
+      the second series here assembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As in the case of the narratives that made up the first volume, I set out
+      again with the same ambitious aim of adhering scrupulously in every
+      instance to actual, recorded facts; and once again I find it desirable at
+      the outset to reveal how far the achievement may have fallen short of the
+      admitted aim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, I have to confess to having allowed myself perhaps a wider
+      latitude, and to having taken greater liberties than was the case with the
+      essays constituting the previous collection. This, however, applies, where
+      applicable, to the parts rather than to the whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only entirely apocryphal narrative here included is the first&mdash;&ldquo;The
+      Absolution.&rdquo; This is one of those stories which, if resting upon no
+      sufficient authority to compel its acceptance, will, nevertheless, resist
+      all attempts at final refutation, having its roots at least in the soil of
+      fact. It is given in the rather discredited Portuguese chronicles of
+      Acenheiro, and finds place, more or less as related here, in Duarte
+      Galvao's &ldquo;Chronicle of Affonso Henriques,&rdquo; whence it was taken by the
+      Portuguese historical writer, Alexandre Herculano, to be included in his
+      &ldquo;Lendas e Narrativas.&rdquo; If it is to be relegated to the Limbo of the ben
+      trovato, at least I esteem it to afford us a precious glimpse of the naive
+      spirit of the age in which it is set, and find in that my justification
+      for including it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next to require apology is &ldquo;His Insolence of Buckingham,&rdquo; but only in
+      so far as the incident of the diamond studs is concerned. The remainder of
+      the narrative, the character of Buckingham, the details of his embassy to
+      Paris, and the particulars of his audacious courtship of Anne of Austria,
+      rest upon unassailable evidence. I would have omitted the very apocryphal
+      incident of the studs, but that I considered it of peculiar interest as
+      revealing the source of the main theme of one of the most famous
+      historical romances ever written&mdash;&ldquo;The Three Musketeers.&rdquo; I give the
+      story as related by La Rochefoucauld in his &ldquo;Memoirs,&rdquo; whence Alexandre
+      Dumas culled it that he might turn it to such excellent romantic account.
+      In La Rochefoucauld's narrative it is the painter Gerbier who, in a far
+      less heroic manner, plays the part assigned by Dumas to d'Artagnan, and it
+      is the Countess of Carlisle who carries out the political theft which
+      Dumas attributes to Milady. For the rest, I do not invite you to attach
+      undue credit to it, which is not, however, to say that I account it wholly
+      false.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the case of &ldquo;The <i>Hermosa Fembra</i>&rdquo; I confess to having blended
+      together into one single narrative two historical episodes closely
+      connected in time and place. Susan's daughter was, in fact, herself the
+      betrayer of her father, and it was in penitence for that unnatural act
+      that she desired her skull to be exhibited as I describe. Into the story
+      of Susan's daughter I have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who,
+      like the Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover&mdash;in this case a
+      youth of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment in
+      circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the judaizing
+      of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore word of it at once to
+      Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in fact by an interval of three
+      years, and the first afforded Ojeda a strong argument for the institution
+      of the Holy Office in Seville. Between the two there are many points of
+      contact, and each supplies what the other lacks to make an interesting
+      narrative having for background the introduction of the Inquisition to
+      Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely fictitious, and the
+      introduction of Torquemada is quite arbitrary. Ojeda was the inquisitor
+      who dealt with both cases. But if there I stray into fiction, at least I
+      claim to have sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand Inquisitor as I
+      know him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life and times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point of view of
+      my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a historical mystery.
+      The mystery lies, of course, in the man's identity. He has been held by
+      some to have been the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otropiev, by others to have
+      been a son of Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. I am not aware that the
+      theory that he was both at one and the same time has ever been put
+      forward, and whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I claim that no
+      other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of his career or to
+      shed light upon its mysteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Undoubtedly I have allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation
+      in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in &ldquo;The Barren Wooing.&rdquo; But the
+      theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the
+      matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to be
+      not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only
+      theory that will convincingly explain the events. Elizabeth, as I show,
+      was widely believed to be an accessory to the murder of Amy Robsart. But
+      in carefully following her words and actions at that critical time, as
+      reported by de Quadra, my reading of the transaction is as given here. The
+      most damning fact against Elizabeth was held to be her own statement to de
+      Quadra on the eve of Lady Robert Dudley's murder to the effect that Lady
+      Robert was &ldquo;already dead, or very nearly so.&rdquo; This foreknowledge of the
+      fate of that unfortunate lady has been accepted as positive evidence that
+      the Queen was a party to the crime at Cumnor, which was to set her lover
+      free to marry again. Far from that, however, I account it positive proof
+      of Elizabeth's innocence of any such part in the deed. Elizabeth was far
+      too crafty and clear-sighted not to realize how her words must incriminate
+      her afterwards if she knew that the murder of Lady Robert was projected.
+      She must have been merely repeating what Dudley himself had told her; and
+      what he must have told her&mdash;and she believed&mdash;was that his wife
+      was at the point of a natural death. Similarly, Dudley would not have told
+      her this, unless his aim had been to procure his wife's removal by means
+      which would admit of a natural interpretation. Difficulties encountered,
+      much as I relate them&mdash;and for which there is abundant evidence&mdash;drove
+      his too-zealous agents to rather desperate lengths, and thus brought
+      suspicion, not only upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent
+      Queen. The manner of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be
+      far from what actually took place. The possibility of an accident&mdash;extraordinarily
+      and suspiciously opportune for Dudley as it would have been&mdash;could
+      not be altogether ruled out but for the further circumstance that Lady
+      Robert had removed everybody from Cumnor on that day. To what can this
+      point&mdash;unless we accept an altogether incredible chain of coincidence&mdash;but
+      to some such plotting as I here suggest?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the remaining six essays in this volume the liberties taken with the
+      absolute facts are so slight as to require no apology or comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      R. S.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      London, June, 1919.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h3>
+      Detailed Contents
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  I. THE ABSOLUTION
+       Affonso Henriques, First King of Portugal
+  II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+       Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+  III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+       An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+  IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+       The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+  V. THE END OF THE VERT GALANT
+       The Assassination of Henry IV
+  VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+       The Murder of Amy Robsart
+  VII. SIR JUDAS
+       The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+  VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+       George Villiers' Courtship of Anne of Austria
+  IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+       The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+  X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+       Count Philip KĂśnigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+  XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+       Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I. THE ABSOLUTION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Aftonso Henriques, first King of Portugal
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In 1093 the Moors of the Almoravide dynasty, under the Caliph Yusuf, swept
+      irresistibly upwards into the Iberian Peninsula, recapturing Lisbon and
+      Santarem in the west, and pushing their conquest as far as the river
+      Mondego.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To meet this revival of Mohammedan power, Alfonso VI. Of Castile summoned
+      the chivalry of Christendom to his aid. Among the knights who answered the
+      call was Count Henry of Burgundy (grandson of Robert, first Duke of
+      Burgundy) to whom Alfonso gave his natural daughter Theresa in marriage,
+      together with the Counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the title of Count
+      of Portugal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is the first chapter of the history of Portugal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Count Henry fought hard to defend his southern frontiers from the
+      incursion of the Moors until his death in 1114. Thereafter his widow
+      Theresa became Regent of Portugal during the minority of their son,
+      Affonso Henriques. A woman of great energy, resource and ambition, she
+      successfully waged war against the Moors, and in other ways laid the
+      foundations upon which her son was to build the Kingdom of Portugal. But
+      her passionate infatuation for one of her knights&mdash;Don Fernando Peres
+      de Trava&mdash;and the excessive honours she bestowed upon him, made
+      enemies for her in the new state, and estranged her from her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1127 Alfonso VII. of Castile invaded Portugal, compelling Theresa to
+      recognize him as her suzerain. But Affonso Henriques, now aged seventeen&mdash;and
+      declared by the citizens of the capital to be of age and competent to
+      reign&mdash;incontinently refused to recognize the submission made by his
+      mother, and in the following year assembled an army for the purpose of
+      expelling her and her lover from the country. The warlike Theresa resisted
+      until defeated in the battle of San Mamede and taken prisoner.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      He was little more than a boy, although four years were sped already
+      since, as a mere lad of fourteen, he had kept vigil throughout the night
+      over his arms in the Cathedral of Zamora, preparatory to receiving the
+      honour of knighthood at the hands of his cousin, Alfonso VII. of Castile.
+      Yet already he was looked upon as the very pattern of what a Christian
+      knight should be, worthy son of the father who had devoted his life to
+      doing battle against the Infidel, wheresoever he might be found. He was
+      well-grown and tall, and of a bodily strength that is almost a byword to
+      this day in that Portugal of which he was the real founder and first king.
+      He was skilled beyond the common wont in all knightly exercises of arms
+      and horsemanship, and equipped with far more learning&mdash;though much of
+      it was ill-digested, as this story will serve to show&mdash;than the
+      twelfth century considered useful or even proper in a knight. And he was
+      at least true to his time in that he combined a fervid piety with a
+      weakness of the flesh and an impetuous arrogance that was to bring him
+      under the ban of greater excommunication at the very outset of his reign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It happened that his imprisonment of his mother was not at all pleasing in
+      the sight of Rome. Dona Theresa had powerful friends, who so used their
+      influence at the Vatican on her behalf that the Holy Father&mdash;conveniently
+      ignoring the provocation she had given and the scandalous, unmotherly
+      conduct of which she had been guilty&mdash;came to consider the behaviour
+      of the Infante of Portugal as reprehensibly unfilial, and commanded him to
+      deliver Dona Theresa at once from duress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Papal order, backed by a threat of excommunication in the event of
+      disobedience, was brought to the young prince by the Bishop of Coimbra,
+      whom he counted among his friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques, ever impetuous and quick to anger, flushed scarlet when
+      he heard that uncompromising message. His dark eyes smouldered as they
+      considered the aged prelate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You come here to bid me let loose again upon this land of Portugal that
+      author of strife, to deliver over the people once more to the oppression
+      of the Lord of Trava?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;And you tell me that unless by obeying
+      this command I am false to the duty I owe this country, you will launch
+      the curse of Rome against me? You tell me this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bishop, deeply stirred, torn between his duty to the Holy See and his
+      affection for his prince, bowed his head and wrung his hands. &ldquo;What choice
+      have I?&rdquo; he asked, on a quavering note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I raised you from the dust.&rdquo; Thunder was rumbling in the prince's voice.
+      &ldquo;Myself I placed the episcopal ring upon your finger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord, my lord! Could I forget? All that I have I owe to you&mdash;save
+      only my soul, which I owe to God; my faith, which I owe to Christ; and my
+      obedience, which I owe to our Holy Father the Pope.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The prince considered him in silence, mastering his passionate, impetuous
+      nature. &ldquo;Go,&rdquo; he growled at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prelate bowed his head, his eyes not daring to meet his prince's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God keep you, lord,&rdquo; he almost sobbed, and so went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though stirred by his affection for the prince to whom he owed so
+      much, though knowing in his inmost heart that Affonso Henriques was in the
+      right, the Bishop of Coimbra did not swerve from his duty to Rome, which
+      was as plain as it was unpalatable. Betimes next morning word was brought
+      to Affonso Henriques in the Alcazar of Coimbra that a parchment was nailed
+      to the door of the Cathedral, setting forth his excommunication, and that
+      the Bishop&mdash;either out of fear or out of sorrow&mdash;had left the
+      city, journeying northward towards Oporto.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques passed swiftly from incredulity to anger; then almost as
+      swiftly came to a resolve, which was as mad and harebrained as could have
+      been expected from a lad in his eighteenth year who held the reins of
+      power. Yet by its very directness and its superb ignoring of all
+      obstacles, legal and canonical, it was invested with a certain wild
+      sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In full armour, a white cloak simply embroidered in gold at the edge and
+      knotted at the shoulder, he rode to the Cathedral, attended by his
+      half-brother Pedro Affonso, and two of his knights, Emigio Moniz and
+      Sancho Nunes. There on the great iron-studded doors he found, as he had
+      been warned, the Roman parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous
+      Latin periods set forth in a fine round clerkly hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung down from his great horse and clanked up the Cathedral steps, his
+      attendants following. He had for witnesses no more than a few loiterers,
+      who had paused at sight of their prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interdict had so far attracted no attention, for in the twelfth
+      century the art of letters was a mystery to which there were few
+      initiates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques tore the sheepskin from its nails, and crumpled it in
+      his hand; then he passed into the Cathedral, and thence came out presently
+      into the cloisters. Overhead a bell was clanging by his orders, summoning
+      the chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Infante, waiting there in the sun-drenched close, came presently
+      the canons, austere, aloof, majestic in their unhurried progress through
+      the fretted cloisters, with flowing garments and hands tucked into their
+      wide sleeves before them. In a semi-circle they arrayed themselves before
+      him, and waited impassively to learn his will. Overhead the bell had
+      ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques wasted no words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have summoned you,&rdquo; he announced, &ldquo;to command that you proceed to the
+      election of a bishop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A rustle stirred through the priestly throng. The canons looked askance at
+      the prince and at one another. Then one of them spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Habemus episcopum,&rdquo; he said gravely, and several instantly made chorus:
+      &ldquo;We have a bishop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The eyes of the young sovereign kindled. &ldquo;You are wrong,&rdquo; he told them.
+      &ldquo;You had a bishop, but he is here no longer. He has deserted his see,
+      after publishing this shameful thing.&rdquo; And he held aloft the crumpled
+      interdict. &ldquo;As I am a God-fearing, Christian knight, I will not live under
+      this ban. Since the bishop who excommunicated me is gone, you will at once
+      elect another in his place who shall absolve me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood before him, silent and impassive, in their priestly dignity,
+      and in their assurance that the law was on their side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; the boy growled at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Habemus episcopum,&rdquo; droned a voice again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amen,&rdquo; boomed in chorus through the cloisters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you that your bishop is gone,&rdquo; he insisted, his voice quivering
+      now with anger, &ldquo;and I tell you that he shall not return, that he shall
+      never set foot again within my city of Coimbra. Proceed you therefore at
+      once to the election of his successor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord,&rdquo; he was answered coldly by one of them, &ldquo;no such election is
+      possible or lawful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you dare stand before my face, and tell me this?&rdquo; he roared,
+      infuriated by their cold resistance. He flung out an arm in a gesture of
+      terrible dismissal. &ldquo;Out of my sight, you proud and evil men! Back to your
+      cells, to await my pleasure. Since in your arrogant, stiff-necked pride
+      you refuse to do my will, you shall receive the bishop I shall myself
+      select.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was so terrific in his rage that they dared not tell him that he had no
+      power, prince though he might be, to make such an election, bowed to him,
+      ever impassively, and with their hands still folded, unhurried as they had
+      come, they now turned and filed past him in departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched them with scowling brows and tightened lips, Moniz and Nunes
+      silent behind him. Suddenly those dark, watchful eyes of his were held by
+      the last figure of all in that austere procession&mdash;a tall, gaunt
+      young man, whose copper-coloured skin and hawk-featured face proclaimed
+      his Moorish blood. Instantly, maliciously, it flashed through the prince's
+      boyish mind how he might make of this man an instrument to humble the
+      pride of that insolent clergy. He raised his hand, and beckoned the cleric
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo; he asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am called Zuleyman, lord,&rdquo; he was answered, and the name confirmed&mdash;where,
+      indeed, no confirmation was necessary&mdash;the fellow's Moorish origin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques laughed. It would be an excellent jest to thrust upon
+      these arrogant priests, who refused to appoint a bishop of their choice, a
+      bishop who was little better than a blackamoor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don Zuleyman,&rdquo; said the prince, &ldquo;I name you Bishop of Coimbra in the room
+      of the rebel who has fled. You will prepare to celebrate High Mass this
+      morning, and to pronounce my absolution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Christianized Moor fell back a step, his face paling under its copper
+      skin to a sickly grey. In the background, the hindmost members of the
+      retreating clerical procession turned and stood at gaze, angered and
+      scandalized by what they heard, which was indeed a thing beyond belief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah no, my lord! Ah no!&rdquo; Don Zuleyman was faltering. &ldquo;Not that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The prospect terrified him, and in his agitation he had recourse to Latin.
+      &ldquo;Domine, non sum dignus,&rdquo; he cried, and beat his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the uncompromising Affonso Henriques gave him back Latin for Latin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dixi&mdash;I have spoken!&rdquo; he answered sternly. &ldquo;Do not fail me in
+      obedience, on your life.&rdquo; And on that he clanked out again with his
+      attendants, well-pleased with his morning's work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he had disposed with boyish, almost irresponsible rashness, and in
+      flagrant contravention of all canon law, so it fell out. Don Zuleyman,
+      wearing the bishop's robes and the bishop's mitre, intoned the Kyrie
+      Eleison before noon that day in the Cathedral of Coimbra, and pronounced
+      the absolution of the Infante of Portugal, who knelt so submissively and
+      devoutly before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques was very pleased with himself. He made a jest of the
+      affair, and invited his intimates to laugh with him. But Emigio Moniz and
+      the elder members of his council refused to laugh. They looked with awe
+      upon a deed that went perilously near to sacrilege, and implored him to
+      take their own sober view of the thing he had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the bones of St. James!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;A prince is not to be brow-beaten
+      by a priest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a view in the twelfth century was little short of revolutionary. The
+      chapter of the Cathedral of Coimbra held the converse opinion that priests
+      were not to be browbeaten by a prince, and set themselves to make Affonso
+      Henriques realize this to his bitter cost. They dispatched to Rome an
+      account of his unconscionable, high-handed, incredible sacrilege, and
+      invited Rome to administer condign spiritual flagellation upon this errant
+      child of Mother Church. Rome made haste to vindicate her authority, and
+      dispatched a legate to the recalcitrant, audacious boy who ruled in
+      Portugal. But the distance being considerable, and means of travel
+      inadequate and slow, it was not until Don Zuleyman had presided in the See
+      of Coimbra for a full two months that the Papal Legate made his appearance
+      in Affonso Henriques' capital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very splendid Prince of the Church was Cardinal Corrado, the envoy
+      dispatched by Pope Honorius II., full armed with apostolic weapons to
+      reduce the rebellious Infante of Portugal into proper subjection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His approach was heralded by the voice of rumour. Affonso Henriques heard
+      of it without perturbation. His conscience at ease in the absolution which
+      he had wrung from Mother Church after his own fashion, he was entirely
+      absorbed in preparations for a campaign against the Moors which was to
+      widen his dominions. Therefore when at length the thunderbolt descended,
+      it fell&mdash;so far as he was concerned&mdash;from a sky entirely clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was towards dusk of a summer evening when the legate, in a litter slung
+      in line between two mules, entered Coimbra. He was attended by two
+      nephews, Giannino and Pierluigi da Corrado, both patricians of Rome, and a
+      little knot of servants. Empanoplied in his sacred office, the cardinal
+      had no need of the protection of men-at-arms upon a journey through
+      god-fearing lands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was borne straight to the old Moorish palace where the Infante resided,
+      and came upon him there amid a numerous company in the great pillared
+      hall. Against a background of battle trophies, livid weapons, implements
+      of war, and suits of mail both Saracen and Christian, with which the bare
+      walls were hung, moved a gaily-clad, courtly gathering of nobles and their
+      women-folk, when the great cardinal, clad from head to foot in scarlet,
+      entered unannounced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Laughter rippled into silence. A hush descended upon the company, which
+      stood now at gaze, considering the imposing and unbidden guest. Slowly the
+      legate, followed by the two Roman youths, advanced down the hall, the soft
+      pad of his slippered feet and the rustle of his silken robes being at
+      first the only sound. On he came, until he stood before the shallow dais,
+      where in a massively carved chair sat the Infante of Portugal,
+      mistrustfully observing him. Affonso Henriques scented here an enemy, an
+      ally of his mother's, the bearer of a fresh declaration of hostilities.
+      Therefore of deliberate purpose he kept his seat, as if to stress the fact
+      that here he was the master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord Cardinal,&rdquo; he greeted the legate, &ldquo;be welcome to my land of
+      Portugal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cardinal bowed stiffly, resentful of this reception. In his long
+      journey across the Spains, princes and nobles had flocked to kiss his
+      hand, and bend the knee before him, seeking his blessing. Yet this mere
+      boy, beardless save for a silky down about his firm young cheeks, retained
+      his seat and greeted him with no more submissiveness than if he had been
+      the envoy of some temporal prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the representative of our Holy Father,&rdquo; he announced, in a voice of
+      stern reproof. &ldquo;I am from Rome, with these my well-beloved nephews.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From Rome?&rdquo; quoth Affonso Henriques. For all his length of limb and
+      massive thews he could be impish upon occasion. He was impish now.
+      &ldquo;Although no good has ever yet come to me from Rome, you make me hopeful.
+      His Holiness will have heard of the preparations I am making for a war
+      against the Infidel that shall carry the Cross where now stands the
+      Crescent, and sends me perhaps, a gift of gold or assist me in this holy
+      work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mockery of it stung the legate sharply. His sallow, ascetic face
+      empurpled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not gold I bring you,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;but a lesson in the faith
+      which you would seem to have forgotten. I am come to teach you your
+      Christian duty, and to require of you immediate reparation of the
+      sacrilegious wrongs you have done. The Holy Father demands of you the
+      instant re-instatement of the Bishop of Coimbra, whom you have driven out
+      with threats of violence, and the degradation of the cleric you
+      blasphemously appointed Bishop in his stead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is that all?&rdquo; quoth the boy, in a voice dangerously quiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; Fearless in his sense of right, the legate towered before him. &ldquo;It
+      is demanded of you further that you instantly release the lady, your
+      mother, from the unjust confinement in which you hold her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That confinement is not unjust, as all here can witness,&rdquo; the Infante
+      answered. &ldquo;Rome may believe it, because lies have been carried to Rome.
+      Dona Theresa's life was a scandal, her regency an injustice to my people.
+      She and the infamous Lord of Trava lighted the torch of civil war in these
+      dominions. Learn here the truth, and carry it to Rome. Thus shall you do
+      worthy service.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the prelate was obstinate and proud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not the answer that our Holy Father awaits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the answer that I send.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rash, rebellious youth, beware!&rdquo; The cardinal's anger flamed up, and his
+      voice swelled. &ldquo;I come armed with spiritual weapons of destruction. Do not
+      abuse the patience of Mother Church, or you shall feel the full weight of
+      her wrath released against you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Exasperated, Affonso Henriques bounded to his feet, his face livid now
+      with passion, his eyes ablaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out! Away!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Go, my lord, and go quickly, or as God watches us
+      I will add here and now yet another sacrilege to those of which you accuse
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The prelate gathered his ample robes about him. If pale, he was entirely
+      calm once more. With stern dignity, he bowed to the angry youth, and so
+      departed, but with such outward impassivity that it would have been
+      difficult to say with whom lay the victory. If Affonso Henriques thought
+      that night that he had conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was awakened early by a chamberlain at the urgent instances of Emigio
+      Moniz, who was demanding immediate audience. Affonso Henriques sat up in
+      bed, and bade him to be admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The elderly knight and faithful counsellor came in, treading heavily. His
+      swarthy face was overcast, his mouth set in stern lines under its grizzled
+      beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God keep you, lord,&rdquo; was his greeting, so lugubriously delivered as to
+      sound like a pious, but rather hopeless, wish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you, Emigio,&rdquo; answered him the Infante. &ldquo;You are early astir. What is
+      the cause?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tidings, lord.&rdquo; He crossed the room, unlatched and flung wide a
+      window. &ldquo;Listen,&rdquo; he bade the prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic
+      hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques recognized
+      it for the murmur of the multitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does it mean?&rdquo; he asked, and thrust a sinewy leg from the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means that the Papal Legate has done all that he threatened, and
+      something more. He has placed your city of Coimbra under a ban of
+      excommunication. The churches are closed, and until the ban is lifted no
+      priest will be found to baptize, marry, shrive or perform any other
+      Sacrament of Holy Church. The people are stricken with terror, knowing
+      that they share the curse with you. They are massing below at the gates of
+      the alcazar, demanding to see you that they may implore you to lift from
+      them the horror of this excommunication.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques had come to his feet by now, and he stood there staring
+      at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart clutched by fear of
+      these impalpable, blasting weapons that were being used against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; he groaned, and asked: &ldquo;What must I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Moniz was preternaturally grave. &ldquo;It is of the first importance that the
+      people should be pacified.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one way only&mdash;by a promise that you will submit to the will
+      of the Holy Father, and by penance seek absolution for yourself and your
+      city.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A red flush swept into the young cheeks that had been so pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; he cried, his voice a roar. &ldquo;Release my mother, depose Zuleyman,
+      recall that fugitive recreant who cursed me, and humble myself to seek
+      pardon at the hands of this insolent Italian cleric? May my bones rot, may
+      I roast for ever in hell-fire if I show myself such a craven! And do you
+      counsel it, Emigio&mdash;do you really counsel that?&rdquo; He was in a towering
+      rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen to that voice,&rdquo; Emigio answered him, and waved a hand to the open
+      window. &ldquo;How else will you silence it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his head in
+      his hands. He was checkmated&mdash;and yet....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose and beat his hands together, summoning chamberlain and pages to
+      help him dress and arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the legate lodged?&rdquo; he asked Moniz.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is gone,&rdquo; the knight answered him. &ldquo;He left at cock-crow, taking the
+      road to Spain along the Mondego&mdash;so I learnt from the watch at the
+      River Gate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How came they to open for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His office, lord, is a key that opens all doors at any hour of day or
+      night. They dared not detain or delay him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; grunted the Infante. &ldquo;We will go after him, then.&rdquo; And he made haste
+      to complete his dressing. Then he buckled on his great sword, and they
+      departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the courtyard of the alcazar, he summoned Sancho Nunes and a half-dozen
+      men-at-arms to attend him, mounted a charger and with Emigio Moniz at his
+      side and the others following, he rode out across the draw-bridge into the
+      open space that was thronged with the clamant inhabitants of the stricken
+      city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great cry went up when he showed himself&mdash;a mighty appeal to him
+      for mercy and the remission of the curse. Then silence fell, a silence
+      that invited him to answer and give comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reined in his horse, and standing in his stirrups very tall and virile,
+      he addressed them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People of Coimbra,&rdquo; he announced, &ldquo;I go to obtain this city's absolution
+      from the ban that has been laid upon it. I shall return before sunset.
+      Till then do you keep the peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice of the multitude was raised again, this time to hail him as the
+      father and protector of the Portuguese, and to invoke the blessing of
+      Heaven upon his handsome head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Riding between Moniz and Nunes, and followed by his glittering
+      men-at-arms, he crossed the city and took the road along the river by
+      which it was known that the legate had departed. All that morning they
+      rode briskly amain, the Infante fasting, as he had risen, yet unconscious
+      of hunger and of all else but the purpose that was consuming him. He rode
+      in utter silence, his face set, his brows stern; and Moniz, watching him
+      furtively the while, wondered what thoughts were stirring in that rash,
+      impetuous young brain, and was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards noon at last they overtook the legate's party. They espied his
+      mule-litter at the door of an inn in a little village some ten miles
+      beyond the foothills of the Bussaco range. The Infante reined up sharply,
+      a hoarse, fierce cry escaping him, akin to that of some creature of the
+      wild when it espies its prey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moniz put forth a hand to seize his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord, my lord,&rdquo; he cried, fearfully. &ldquo;What is your purpose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The prince looked him between the eyes, and his lips curled in a smile
+      that was not altogether sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to beg Cardinal Corrado to have compassion on me,&rdquo; he
+      answered, subtly mocking, and on that he swung down from his horse, and
+      tossed the reins to a man-at-arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Into the inn he clanked, Moniz and Nunes following closely. He thrust
+      aside the vintner who, not knowing him, would have hindered him, great lord
+      though he seemed, from disturbing the holy guest who was honouring the
+      house. He strode on, and into the room where the Cardinal with his noble
+      nephews sat at dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At sight of him, fearing violence, Giannino and Pierluigi came instantly
+      to their feet, their hands upon their daggers. But Cardinal da Corrado sat
+      unmoved. He looked up, a smile of ineffable gentleness upon his ascetic
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had hoped that you would come after me, my son,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you come
+      a penitent, then has my prayer been heard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A penitent!&rdquo; cried Affonso Henriques. He laughed wickedly, and plucked
+      his dagger from its sheath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sancho Nunes, in terror, set a detaining hand upon his prince's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord,&rdquo; he cried in a voice that shook, &ldquo;you will not strike the Lord's
+      anointed&mdash;that were to destroy yourself for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A curse,&rdquo; said Affonso Henriques, &ldquo;perishes with him that uttered it.&rdquo; He
+      could reason loosely, you see, this hot-blooded, impetuous young cutter of
+      Gordian knots. &ldquo;And it imports above all else that the curse should be
+      lifted from my city of Coimbra.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It shall be, my son, as soon as you show penitence and a Christian
+      submission to the Holy Father's will,&rdquo; said the undaunted Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God give me patience with you,&rdquo; Affonso Henriques answered him. &ldquo;Listen
+      to me now, lord Cardinal.&rdquo; And he leaned forward on his dagger, burying
+      the point of it some inches into the deal table. &ldquo;That you should punish
+      me with the weapons of the Faith for the sins that you allege against me I
+      can understand and suffer. There is reason in that, perhaps. But will you
+      tell me what reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an offence
+      which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?&mdash;and in punishing it by a
+      curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are denied those
+      true children of Mother Church, that no priestly office may be performed
+      within the city, that men and women may not approach the altars of the
+      Faith, that they must die unshriven with their sins upon them, and so be
+      damned through all eternity? Where is the reason that urges this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cardinal's smile had changed from one of benignity to one of guile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, I will answer you. Out of their terror they will be moved to revolt
+      against you, unless you relieve them of the ban. Thus, Lord Prince, I hold
+      you in check. You make submission or else you are destroyed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques considered him a moment. &ldquo;You answer me indeed,&rdquo; said
+      he, and then his voice swelled up in denunciation. &ldquo;But this is
+      statecraft, not religion. And when a prince has no statecraft to match
+      that which is opposed to him, do you know what follows? He has recourse to
+      force, Lord Cardinal. You compel me to it; upon your own head the
+      consequences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The legate almost sneered. &ldquo;What is the force of your poor lethal weapons
+      compared with the spiritual power I wield? Do you threaten me with death?
+      Do you think I fear it?&rdquo; He rose in a surge of sudden wrath, and tore open
+      his scarlet robe. &ldquo;Strike here with your poniard. I wear no mail. Strike
+      if you dare, and by the sacrilegious blow destroy yourself in this world
+      and the next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Infante considered him. Slowly he sheathed his dagger, smiling a
+      little. Then he beat his hands together. His men-at-arms came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seize me those two Roman whelps,&rdquo; he commanded, and pointed to Giannino
+      and Pierlulgi. &ldquo;Seize them, and make them fast. About it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord Prince!&rdquo; cried the legate in a voice of appeal, wherein fear and
+      anger trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the note of fear that heartened Affonso Henriques. &ldquo;About it!&rdquo; he
+      cried again, though needlessly, for already his men-at-arms were at grips
+      with the Cardinal's nephews. In a trice the kicking, biting, swearing pair
+      were overpowered, deprived of arms, and pinioned. The men looked to their
+      prince for further orders. In the background Moniz and Nunes witnessed all
+      with troubled countenances, whilst the Cardinal, beyond the table, white
+      to the lips, demanded in a quavering voice to know what violence was
+      intended, implored the Infante to consider, and in the same breath
+      threatened him with dread consequences of this affront.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques, unmoved, pointed through the window to a stalwart oak
+      that stood before the inn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take them out there, and hang them unshriven,&rdquo; he commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal swayed, and almost fell forward. He clutched the table,
+      speechless with terror for those lads who were as the very apple of his
+      eye, he who so fearlessly had bared his own breast to the steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two comely Italian youths were dragged out writhing in their captors'
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the half-swooning legate found his voice. &ldquo;Lord Prince,&rdquo; he
+      gasped. &ldquo;Lord Prince... you cannot do this infamy! You cannot! I warn you
+      that... that...&rdquo; The threat perished unuttered, slain by mounting terror.
+      &ldquo;Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as you hope for mercy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What mercy do you practice, you who preach a gospel of mercy in the
+      world, and cry for mercy now?&rdquo; the Infante asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is an infamy! What harm have those poor children done? What
+      concern is it of theirs that I have offended you in performing my sacred
+      duty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Swift into that opening flashed the home-thrust of the Infante's answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What harm have my people of Coimbra done? What concern is it of theirs
+      that I have offended you? Yet to master me you did not hesitate to strike
+      at them with the spiritual weapons that are yours. To master you I do not
+      hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that are mine.
+      When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the things that
+      argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will
+      see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart will
+      be touched, your monstrous pride abated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, under the tree, the figures of the men-at-arms were moving.
+      Expeditiously, and with indifference, they went about the preparations for
+      the task entrusted to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal writhed, and fought for breath. &ldquo;Lord Prince, this must not
+      be!&rdquo; He stretched forth supplicating hands. &ldquo;Lord Prince, you must release
+      my nephews.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord Cardinal, you must absolve my people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If... if you will first make submission. My duty... to the Holy See... Oh
+      God! Will nothing move you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When they have been hanged you will understand, and out of your own
+      affliction learn compassion.&rdquo; The Infante's voice was so cold, his mien so
+      resolute that the legate despaired of conquering his purpose. Abruptly he
+      capitulated, even as the halters went about the necks of his two cherished
+      lads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; he screamed. &ldquo;Bid them stop! The curse shall be lifted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Affonso Henriques opened the window with a leisureliness which to the
+      legate seemed to belong to the realm of nightmare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait yet a moment,&rdquo; the Infante called to those outside, about whom by
+      now a little knot of awe-stricken villagers had gathered. Then he turned
+      again to Cardinal Corrado, who had sunk to his chair like a man exhausted,
+      and sat now panting, his elbows on the table, his head in his hands.
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; said the prince, &ldquo;are the terms upon which you may have their
+      lives: Complete absolution, and Apostolic benediction for my people and
+      myself this very night, I on my side making submission to the Holy
+      Father's will to the extent of releasing my mother from duress, with the
+      condition that she leaves Portugal at once and does not return. As for the
+      banished bishop and his successor, matters must remain as they are; but
+      you can satisfy your conscience on that score by yourself confirming the
+      appointment of Don Zuleyman. Come, my lord, I am being generous, I think.
+      In the enlargement of my mother I afford you the means of satisfying Rome.
+      If you have learnt your lesson from what I here proposed, your conscience
+      should satisfy you of the rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be it so,&rdquo; the Cardinal answered hoarsely. &ldquo;I will return with you to
+      Coimbra and do your will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon, without any tinge of mockery, but in completest sincerity in
+      token that the feud between them was now completely healed, Affonso
+      Henriques went down upon his knees, like the true and humble son of Holy
+      Church he accounted himself, to ask a blessing at the Cardinal's hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The news of it first reached him whilst he sat at supper in the great hall
+      of his palace in the Kremlin. It came at a time when already there was
+      enough to distract his mind; for although the table before him was spread
+      and equipped as became an emperor's, the gaunt spectre of famine stalked
+      outside in the streets of Moscow, and men and women were so reduced by it
+      that cannibalism was alleged to be breaking out amongst them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone, save for the ministering pages, sat Boris Godunov under the iron
+      lamps that made of the table, with its white napery and vessels of gold
+      and silver plate, an island of light in the gloom of that vast apartment.
+      The air was fragrant with the scent of burning pine, for although the time
+      of year was May, the nights were chill, and a great log-fire was blazing
+      on the distant hearth. To him, as he sat there, came his trusted Basmanov
+      with those tidings which startled him at first, seeming to herald that at
+      last the sword of Nemesis was swung above his sinful head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basmanov, a flush tinting the prominent cheek-bones of his sallow face, an
+      excited glitter in his long eyes, began by ordering the pages out of
+      earshot, then leaning forward quickly muttered forth his news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the first words of it, the Tsar's knife clashed into his golden
+      platter, and his short, powerful hands clutched the carved arms of his
+      great gilded chair. Quickly he controlled himself, and then as he
+      continued to listen he was moved to scorn, and a faint smile began to stir
+      under his grizzled beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man had appeared in Poland&mdash;such was the burden of Basmanov's story&mdash;coming
+      none knew exactly whence, who claimed to be Demetrius, the son of Ivan
+      Vassielivitch, and lawful Tsar of Russia&mdash;Demetrius, who was believed
+      to have died at Uglich ten years ago, and whose remains lay buried in
+      Moscow, in the Church of St. Michael. This man had found shelter in
+      Lithuania, in the house of Prince Wisniowiecki, and thither the nobles of
+      Poland were now flocking to do him homage, acknowledging him the son of
+      Ivan the Terrible. He was said to be the living image of the dead Tsar,
+      save that he was swarthy and black-haired, like the dowager Tsarina, and
+      there were two warts on his face, such as it was remembered had disfigured
+      the countenance of the boy Demetrius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Basmanov, adding that he had dispatched a messenger into Lithuania to
+      obtain more precise confirmation of the story. That messenger&mdash;chosen
+      in consequence of something else that Basmanov had been told&mdash;was
+      Smirnoy Otrepiev.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Tsar Boris sat back in his chair, his eyes on the gem encrusted
+      goblet, the stem of which his fingers were mechanically turning. There was
+      now no vestige of the smile on his round white face. It had grown set and
+      thoughtful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Find Prince Shuiski,&rdquo; he said presently, &ldquo;and send him to me here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the tale the boyar had brought him he offered now no comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will talk of this again, Basmanov,&rdquo; was all he said in acknowledgment
+      that he had heard, and in dismissal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when the boyar had gone, Boris Godunov heaved himself to his feet, and
+      strode over to the fire, his great head sunk between his massive
+      shoulders. He was a short, thick-set, bow-legged man, inclining to
+      corpulence. He set a foot, shod in red leather reversed with ermine, upon
+      an andiron, and, leaning an elbow on the carved overmantel, rested his
+      brow against his hand. His eyes stared into the very heart of the fire, as
+      if they beheld there the pageant of the past, upon which his mind was
+      bent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nineteen years were sped since Ivan the Terrible had passed away, leaving
+      two sons, Feodor Ivanovitch, who had succeeded him, and the infant
+      Demetrius. Feodor, a weakling who was almost imbecile, had married Irene,
+      the daughter of Boris Godunov, whereby it had fallen out that Boris became
+      the real ruler of Russia, the power behind the throne. But his insatiable
+      ambition coveted still more. He must wear the crown as well as wield the
+      sceptre; and this could not be until the Ruric dynasty which had ruled
+      Russia for nearly seven centuries should be stamped out. Between himself
+      and the throne stood his daughter's husband and their child, and the boy
+      Demetrius, who had been dispatched with his mother, the dowager Tsarina,
+      to Uglich. The three must be removed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boris began with the last, and sought at first to drive him out of the
+      succession without bloodshed. He attempted to have him pronounced
+      illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of Ivan's seventh wife
+      (the orthodox Church recognizing no wife as legitimate beyond the third).
+      But in this he failed. The memory of the terrible Tsar, the fear of him,
+      was still alive in superstitious Russia, and none dared to dishonour his
+      son. So Boris had recourse to other and surer means. He dispatched his
+      agents to Uglich, and presently there came thence a story that the boy,
+      whilst playing with a knife, had been taken with a fit of epilepsy, and
+      had fallen, running the blade into his throat. But it was not a story that
+      could carry conviction to the Muscovites, since with it came the news that
+      the town of Uglich had risen against the emissaries of Boris, charging
+      them with the murder of the boy, and killing them out of hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Terrible had been the vengeance which Boris had exacted. Of the luckless
+      inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by his orders, and
+      the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural Mountains, whilst the
+      Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for having said that her boy was
+      murdered at the instigation of Boris, was packed off to a convent, and had
+      remained there ever since in close confinement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That had been in 1591. The next to go was Feodor's infant son, and lastly&mdash;in
+      1598&mdash;Feodor himself, succumbing to a mysterious illness, and leaving
+      Boris a clear path to the throne. But he ascended it under the burden of
+      his daughter's curse. Feodor's widow had boldly faced her father, boldly
+      accused him of poisoning her husband to gratify his remorseless ambitions,
+      and on a passionate appeal to God to let it be done by him as he had done
+      by others she had departed to a convent, swearing never to set eyes upon
+      him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thought of her was with him now, as he stood there looking into the
+      heart of the fire; and perhaps it was the memory of her curse that turned
+      his stout heart to water, and made him afraid where there could surely be
+      no cause for fear. For five years now had he been Tsar of Russia, and in
+      these five years he had taken such a grip of power as was not lightly to
+      be loosened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long he stood there, and there he was found by the magnificent Prince
+      Shuiski, whom he had bidden Basmanov to summon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You went to Uglich when the Tsarevitch Demetrius was slain,&rdquo; said Boris.
+      His voice and mien were calm and normal. &ldquo;Yourself you saw the body. There
+      is no possibility that you could have been mistaken in it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mistaken?&rdquo; The boyar was taken aback by the question. He was a tall man,
+      considerably younger than Boris, who was in his fiftieth year. His face
+      was lean and saturnine, and there was something sinister in the dark,
+      close-set eyes under a single, heavy line of eyebrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boris explained his question, telling him what he had learnt from
+      Basmanov. Basil Shuiski laughed. The story was an absurd one. Demetrius
+      was dead. Himself he had held the body in his arms, and no mistake was
+      possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Despite himself, a sigh of relief fluttered from the lips of Boris.
+      Shuiski was right. It was an absurd story, this. There was nothing to
+      fear. He had been a fool to have trembled for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, he brooded more and more over
+      all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that the nobility of
+      Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki to do honour to this
+      false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris found the chief cause of
+      uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow, and empty bellies do not make for
+      loyalty. Then, too, the Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had ruled
+      too sternly, and had curbed their power. There were men like Basil Shuiski
+      who knew too much&mdash;greedy, ambitious men, who might turn their
+      knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to the
+      pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a messenger
+      to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he would yield up the
+      person of this false Demetrius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin too late.
+      The pretender had already left the place, and was safely lodged in the
+      castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of Sandomir, to whose daughter
+      Maryna he was betrothed. If these were ill tidings for Boris, there were
+      worse to follow soon. Within a few months he learned from Sandomir that
+      Demetrius had removed to Cracow, and that there he had been publicly
+      acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of Ivan Vassielivitch,
+      the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He heard, too, the story upon
+      which this belief was founded. Demetrius had declared that one of the
+      agents employed by Boris Godunov to procure his murder at Uglich had
+      bribed his physician Simon to perform the deed. Simon had pretended to
+      agree as the only means of saving him. He had dressed the son of a serf,
+      who slightly resembled Demetrius, in garments similar to those worn by the
+      young prince, and thereafter cut the lad's throat, leaving those who had
+      found the body to presume it to be the prince's. Meanwhile, Demetrius
+      himself had been concealed by the physician, and very shortly thereafter
+      carried away from Uglich, to be placed in safety in a monastery, where he
+      had been educated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the court of
+      Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich came forward now to
+      identify with him the grown man, who carried in his face so strong a
+      resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That story which Boris now heard was
+      soon heard by all Russia, and Boris realized that something must be done
+      to refute it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But something more than assurances&mdash;his own assurances&mdash;were
+      necessary if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last Boris
+      bethought him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the murdered boy. He had
+      her fetched to Moscow from her convent, and told her of this pretender who
+      was setting up a claim to the throne of Russia, supported by the King of
+      Poland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes and
+      conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had done,
+      a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these last
+      twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost under her
+      very eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a circumstantial tale,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It is perhaps true. It is
+      probably true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True!&rdquo; He bounded from his seat. &ldquo;True? What are you saying, woman?
+      Yourself you saw the boy dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did, and I know who killed him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set the
+      people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered. And added the question: &ldquo;What do you want of me now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do I want?&rdquo; He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated. Had the
+      conventual confinement turned her head? &ldquo;I want your testimony. I want you
+      to denounce this fellow for the impostor that he is. The people will
+      believe you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think they will?&rdquo; Interest had kindled in her glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a mother
+      know her own son?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget. He was ten years of age then&mdash;a child. Now he is a grown
+      man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be sure of
+      anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swore a full round oath at her. &ldquo;Because you saw him dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of yours who
+      killed him. Yet you made me swear&mdash;as the price of my brothers' lives&mdash;that
+      I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken than we thought. Perhaps my
+      little Demetrius was not slain at all. Perhaps this man's tale is true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps...&rdquo; He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully, searchingly.
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he asked her sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that once had
+      been so lovely. &ldquo;I mean that if the devil came out of hell and called
+      himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your undoing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon her wrongs
+      broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His jaw dropped foolishly,
+      and he stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The people will believe me, you say&mdash;they will believe that a mother
+      should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation numbered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he was
+      forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the weapon with
+      which she could destroy him. The result of it was that she went back to
+      her convent under close guard, and was thereafter confined with greater
+      rigour than hitherto.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining ground in
+      Russia with the people. The nobles might still be sceptical, but Boris
+      knew that he could not trust them, since they had no cause to love him. He
+      began perhaps to realize that it is not good to rule by fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he had been
+      sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation of the rumour
+      which had reached the boyar on the score of the pretender's real identity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none other
+      than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a monk, but,
+      unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had abandoned himself to
+      licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy had been chosen by Basmanov
+      for this particular mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor in proper
+      terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to Sigismund III. to
+      proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to demand his expulsion from the
+      Kingdom of Poland; and his denunciation was supported by a solemn
+      excommunication pronounced by the Patriarch of Moscow against the
+      unfrocked monk, Grishka Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself Demetrius
+      Ivanovitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris expected. It
+      was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly, accomplished man, speaking
+      Polish and Latin, as well as Russian, skilled in horsemanship and in the
+      use of arms, and it was asked how an unfrocked monk had come by these
+      accomplishments. Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had prevented the
+      Tsarina Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives of revenge, he
+      had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that, actuated by the
+      same motives, they might do that which he had prevented her from doing.
+      This was what occurred. The brothers Nagoy repaired to Cracow publicly to
+      acknowledge Demetrius their nephew, and to enrol themselves under his
+      banner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The sword of
+      Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out. Nothing remained him
+      but to arm and go forth to meet the impostor, who was advancing upon
+      Moscow with a great host of Poles and Cossacks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They, too, had
+      been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen him slain.
+      Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was it possible that
+      Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well as the Palatine of
+      Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the adventurer, Prince Adam
+      Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false Demetrius had first made his
+      appearance, and all those Polish nobles who flocked to his banner? Or were
+      they, too, moved by some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time&mdash;in the
+      winter of 1604&mdash;he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent them
+      because, crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of leading them was
+      denied him. He was forced to stay at home in the gloomy apartments of the
+      Kremlin, fretted by care, with the ghosts of his evil past to keep him
+      company, and assure him that the hour of judgment was at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to the
+      adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he sent Shuiski
+      to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at Dobrinichi, and
+      Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which compelled him to fall back on
+      Putioli. He lost all his infantry, and every Russian taken in arms on the
+      pretender's side was remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed and no
+      decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of the past gnawed
+      at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then there was ever present to
+      his mind the nightmare riddle of the pretender's identity. At last, one
+      evening in April, he sent for Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again
+      concerning that nephew of his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not
+      good to be the uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great
+      prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white face was
+      haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had lost all its
+      erstwhile firm vigour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have sent for you to question you again,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;touching this lewd
+      nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked monk, who claims to
+      be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that you have made no mistake&mdash;are
+      you sure?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his mien. But
+      he made answer: &ldquo;Alas, Highness! I could not be mistaken. I am sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His terrible
+      eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the mental stage in
+      which he mistrusted everything and everybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You lie, you dog,&rdquo; he snarled savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Highness, I swear...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lies!&rdquo; Boris roared him down. &ldquo;And here's the proof. Would Sigismund of
+      Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you say? When I denounced
+      him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev, would not Sigismund have verified
+      the statement had it been true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius...&rdquo; Otrepiev was
+      beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after&mdash;long
+      after&mdash;my denunciation.&rdquo; He broke into oaths. &ldquo;I say you lie. Will
+      you stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until the rack
+      pulls you joint from joint before you speak the truth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Highness!&rdquo; cried Otrepiev, &ldquo;I have served you faithfully these years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth, man; as you hope for life,&rdquo; thundered the Tsar, &ldquo;the whole
+      truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your nephew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread. &ldquo;He is not
+      my nephew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not?&rdquo; It was a roar of rage. &ldquo;You dared lie to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon them
+      before the irate Tsar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not lie&mdash;not altogether. I told you a half-truth, Highness.
+      His name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which he always has been
+      known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I said, and the son of my
+      brother's wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then... then...&rdquo; Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he understood. &ldquo;And his
+      father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King Stephen's
+      natural son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is true?&rdquo; he asked, and himself answered the question. &ldquo;Of course it
+      is true. It is the light at last... at last. You may go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly. He could
+      not know of how little account to Boris was the deception he had practiced
+      in comparison with the truth he had now revealed, a truth that shed a
+      fearful, dazzling light upon the dark mystery of the false Demetrius. The
+      problem that so long had plagued the Tsar was solved at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son of
+      Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund of Poland and
+      the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the score of his identity.
+      They, and no doubt other of the leading nobles of Poland, knew the man for
+      what he was, and because of it supported him, using the fiction of his
+      being Demetrius Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and facilitate the
+      pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the object of it was to
+      set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and a Roman Catholic. Boris
+      knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already had sacrificed a throne&mdash;that
+      of Sweden&mdash;to his devout conscience, and he saw clearly to the heart
+      of this intrigue. Had he not heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow,
+      and that this Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim?
+      What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why should a
+      Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne of a country
+      devoted to the Greek faith?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of this
+      business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and Sigismund had
+      fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an elected King of Poland,
+      Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious son of Stephen Bathory one who
+      might perhaps supplant him on the Polish throne. To divert his ambition
+      into another channel he had fathered&mdash;if he had not invented&mdash;this
+      fiction that the pretender was the dead Demetrius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from the first,
+      what months of annoyance might he not have been spared; how easy it might
+      have been to prick this bubble of imposture. But better late than never.
+      To-morrow he would publish the true facts, and all the world should know
+      the truth; and it was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this
+      superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church, who
+      favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was being baited for
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign envoys,
+      and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had been for many a day.
+      He was heartened by the thought of what was now to do, by the conviction
+      that he held the false Demetrius in the hollow of his hand. There to those
+      envoys he would announce to-night what to-morrow he would announce to all
+      Russia&mdash;tell them of the discovery he had made, and reveal to his
+      subjects the peril in which they stood. Towards the close of the banquet
+      he rose to address his guests, announcing that he had an important
+      communication for them. In silence they waited for him to speak. And then,
+      abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into his chair, fighting
+      for breath, clawing the air, his face empurpling until suddenly the blood
+      gushed copiously from his mouth and nostrils.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel and wrap
+      himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting aside of earthly
+      vanities, and then he expired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His death was
+      certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is nothing in the manner
+      of it to justify the opinion that it resulted from anything other than an
+      apoplexy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow to place
+      Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this lad of sixteen was
+      very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the army, being now inspired by
+      jealousy and fear of the ambitious Shuiski, went over at once to the
+      pretender, and proclaimed him Tsar of Russia. Thereafter events moved
+      swiftly. Basmanov marched on Moscow, entered it in triumph, and again
+      proclaimed Demetrius, whereupon the people rose in revolt against the son
+      of the usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled the boy and his
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his life at
+      the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the Muscovites that the boy
+      whose body he had seen at Uglich was not that of Demetrius, but of a
+      peasant's son, who had been murdered in his stead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's path, and he
+      advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet before he occupied it,
+      he showed the real principles that actuated him, proved how true had been
+      Boris's conclusion. He ordered the arrest and degradation of the Patriarch
+      who had denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place appointed
+      Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to the Roman
+      communion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his triumphal entry
+      into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before the tomb of Ivan the
+      Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina Maria, who, after a brief
+      communion with him in private, came forth publicly to acknowledge him as
+      her son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she purchase
+      her enlargement from that convent where so long she had been a prisoner,
+      and restoration to the rank that was her proper due. After all, she had
+      cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in addition to restoring her these
+      things, had avenged her upon the hated Boris Godunov.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing adventurer
+      found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia, with Basmanov at
+      his right hand to help and guide him. And at first all went well, and the
+      young Tsar earned a certain measure of popularity. If his swarthy face was
+      coarse-featured, yet his bearing was so courtly and gracious that he won
+      his way quickly to the hearts of his people. For the rest he was of a
+      tall, graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a knightly address at arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to serve
+      two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the orthodox Russians
+      whose tsar he was, and on the other there were the Poles, who had made him
+      so at a price, and who now demanded payment. Because he saw that this
+      payment would be difficult and fraught with peril to himself he would&mdash;after
+      the common wont of princes who have attained their objects&mdash;have
+      repudiated the debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or at least to
+      evade, the persistent reminders that reached him from the Papal Nuncio, to
+      whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of the Roman faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different terms. The
+      King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had reached him that Boris
+      Godunov was still alive, and that he had taken refuge in England, adding
+      that he might be tempted to restore the fugitive to the throne of Muscovy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused Demetrius to
+      a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken, which were precisely as
+      Boris Godunov had surmised. As a beginning he granted the Jesuits
+      permission to build a church within the sacred walls of the Kremlin,
+      whereby he gave great scandal. Soon followed other signs that he was not a
+      true son of the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by his indifference
+      to public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs, and by surrounding
+      himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he conferred high offices and
+      dignities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling against him,
+      resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they had been swindled.
+      Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat Shuiski, who had not
+      derived from his perjury all the profit he expected, who resented, above
+      all, to see Basmanov&mdash;who had ever been his rival&mdash;invested with
+      a power second only to that of the Tsar himself. Shuiski, skilled in
+      intrigue, went to work in his underground, burrowing fashion. He wrought
+      upon the clergy, who in their turn wrought upon the populace, and
+      presently all was seething disaffection under a surface apparently calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter of the
+      Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow, the bride-elect
+      of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and the feasting that followed
+      found little favour in the eyes of the Muscovites, who now beheld their
+      city aswarm with heretic Poles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May, 1606. And
+      now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so skilfully laid.
+      Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built before the walls of Moscow
+      for a martial spectacle which he had planned for the entertainment of his
+      bride. Shuiski put it abroad that the fort was intended to serve as an
+      engine of destruction, and that the martial spectacle was a pretence, the
+      real object being that from the fort the Poles were to cast firebrands
+      into the city, and then proceed to the slaughter of the inhabitants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated populace. They
+      flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May they stormed the
+      Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski himself, to the cry of &ldquo;Death
+      to the heretic! Death to the impostor!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the Tsar's
+      bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword in hand to bar
+      the way and give his master time to escape. The Tsar leapt from a balcony
+      thirty feet to the ground, broke his leg, and lay there helpless, to be
+      dispatched by his enemies, who presently discovered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius Ivanovitch.
+      Nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked monk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the hands of
+      priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his doom.
+      But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of
+      priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous sins
+      that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one of
+      them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if he had
+      been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured,
+      and finally broken him so that he died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme of human
+      things. And that part being played, the rest mattered little. In the
+      nature of him and of his position it was impossible that his imposture
+      should be other than ephemeral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in those
+      early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the previous
+      October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de Torquemada, acting
+      jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns&mdash;Ferdinand and Isabella&mdash;had
+      appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, ordering them to set up a
+      Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to deal with the apostatizing said to be
+      rampant among the New-Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so large a
+      proportion of the population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children of
+      Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing circlet
+      of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that they should reside
+      within the walled confines of their ghettos and never be found beyond them
+      after nightfall, and that they should not practice as doctors, surgeons,
+      apothecaries, or innkeepers. The desire to emancipate themselves from
+      these and other restrictions upon their commerce with Christians and from
+      the generally intolerable conditions of bondage and ignominy imposed upon
+      them, had driven many to accept baptism and embrace Christianity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions of faith
+      failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought. Bitter racial
+      hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never extinguished by their
+      conversion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal, sinister
+      pageant&mdash;the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded inquisitors, with
+      their attendant familiars and barefoot friars&mdash;headed by a Dominican
+      bearing the white Cross, which invaded the city of Seville one day towards
+      the end of December and took its way to the Convent of St. Paul, there to
+      establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the
+      New-Christians that they were to be the object of the attentions of this
+      dread tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
+      city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the Duke of
+      Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed inquisitors
+      of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth that inasmuch as it
+      had come to their knowledge that many persons had departed out of Seville
+      in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical pravity, they commanded
+      the nobles of the Kingdom of Castile that within fifteen days they should
+      make an exact return of the persons of both sexes who had sought refuge in
+      their lordships or jurisdictions; that they arrest all these and lodge
+      them in the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating their
+      property, and holding it at the disposal of the inquisitors; that none
+      should shelter any fugitive under pain of greater excommunication and of
+      other penalties by law established against abettors of heretics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women merely
+      because they had departed from Seville before departure was in any way
+      forbidden, revealed the severity with which the inquisitors intended to
+      proceed. It completed the consternation of the New-Christians who had
+      remained behind, and how numerous these were may be gathered from the fact
+      that in the district of Seville alone they numbered a hundred thousand,
+      many of them occupying, thanks to the industry and talent characteristic
+      of their race, positions of great eminence. It even disquieted the
+      well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all his vain, empty,
+      pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known perturbation. Not
+      that he was a New-Christian. He was of a lineage that went back to the
+      Visigoths, of purest red Castilian blood, untainted by any strain of that
+      dark-hued, unclean fluid alleged to flow in Hebrew veins. But it happened
+      that he was in love with the daughter of the millionaire Diego de Susan, a
+      girl whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was known throughout
+      Seville and for many a mile around as la Hermosa Fembra; and he knew that
+      such commerce&mdash;licit or illicitly conducted&mdash;was disapproved by
+      the holy fathers. His relations with the girl had been perforce
+      clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy fathers was matched in
+      thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It had been vexatious enough on
+      that account not to be able to boast himself the favoured of the beautiful
+      and opulent Isabella de Susan; it was exasperating to discover now a new
+      and more imperative reason for this odious secrecy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more aggrieved than
+      that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped in his black cloak, he
+      gained the Calle de Ataud on that January night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily escaladed
+      balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella, the delight of her
+      effaced all other considerations. Her father was from home, as she had
+      told him in the note that summoned him; he was away at Palacios on some
+      merchant's errand, and would not return until the morrow. The servants
+      were all abed, and so Don Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and
+      lounge at his ease upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon
+      him with a Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in
+      which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her bower, a
+      long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and taste. The walls
+      were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with costly Eastern rugs; on
+      an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-beaked lamp of beaten copper charged
+      with aromatic oil shed light and perfume through the apartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Don Rodrigo sipped his wine, and his dark, hungry eyes followed her as she
+      moved about him with vaguely voluptuous, almost feline grace. The wine,
+      the heavy perfume of the lamp, and the beauty of her played havoc among
+      them with his senses, so that he forgot for the moment his Castilian
+      lineage and clean Christian blood, forgot that she derived from the
+      accursed race of the Crucifiers. All that he remembered was that she was
+      the loveliest woman in Seville, daughter to the wealthiest man, and in
+      that hour of weakness he decided to convert into reality that which had
+      hitherto been no more than an infamous presence. He would loyally fulfil
+      the false, disloyal promises he had made. He would take her to wife. It
+      was a sacrifice which her beauty and her wealth should make worth while.
+      Upon that impulse he spoke now, abruptly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isabella, when will you marry me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood before him, looking down into his weak, handsome face, her
+      fingers interlacing his own. She merely smiled. The question did not
+      greatly move her. Not knowing him for the scoundrel that he was, guessing
+      nothing of the present perturbation of his senses, she found it very
+      natural that he should ask her to appoint the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a question you must ask my father,&rdquo; she answered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to-morrow, on his return.&rdquo; And he drew her down beside
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that father was nearer than either of them dreamed. At that very
+      moment the soft thud of the closing housedoor sounded through the house.
+      It brought her sharply to her feet, and loose from his coiling arms, with
+      quickened breath and blanching face. A moment she hung there, tense, then
+      sped to the door of the room, set it ajar and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up the stairs came the sound of footsteps and of muttering voices. It was
+      her father, and others with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With ever-mounting fear she turned to Don Rodrigo, and breathed the
+      question: &ldquo;If they should come here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Castilian stood where he had risen by the divan, his face paler now
+      than its pale, aristocratic wont, his eyes reflecting the fear that
+      glittered in her own. He had no delusion as to what action Diego de Susan
+      would take upon discovering him. These Jewish dogs were quickly stirred to
+      passion, and as jealous as their betters of the honour of their womenfolk.
+      Already Don Rodrigo in imagination saw his clean red Christian blood
+      bespattering that Hebrew floor, for he had no weapon save the heavy Toledo
+      dagger at his girdle, and Diego de Susan was not alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was, he felt, a ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain. But his
+      dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another moment she had
+      bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the chamber's end, a tiny
+      closet that was no better than a cupboard contrived for the storing of
+      household linen. She had-moved with a swift precision which at another
+      time might have provoked his admiration, snatching up his cloak and hat,
+      and other evidences of his presence, quenching the lamp, and dragging him
+      to that place of cramped concealment, which she remained to share with
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Came presently movements in the room beyond, and the voice of her father:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be securest from intrusion here. It is my daughter's room. If
+      you will give me leave, I will go down again to admit our other friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Those other friends, as Don Rodrigo gathered, continued to arrive for the
+      next half-hour, until in the end there must have been some twenty of them
+      assembled in that chamber. The mutter of voices had steadily increased,
+      but so confused that no more than odd words, affording no clue to the
+      reason of this gathering, had reached the hidden couple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then quite suddenly a silence fell, and on that silence beat the
+      sharp, clear voice of Diego de Susan addressing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friends,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have called you hither that we may concert
+      measures for the protection of ourselves and all New-Christians in Seville
+      from the fresh peril by which we are menaced. The edict of the inquisitors
+      reveals how much we have to fear. You may gather from it that the court of
+      the Holy Office is hardly likely to deal in justice, and that the most
+      innocent may find himself at any moment exposed to its cruel mercies.
+      Therefore it is for us now to consider how to protect ourselves and our
+      property from the unscrupulous activities of this tribunal. You are the
+      principal New Christian citizens of Seville; you are wealthy, not only in
+      property, but also in the goodwill of the people, who trust and respect,
+      and at need will follow, you. If nothing less will serve, we must have
+      recourse to arms; and so that we are resolute and united, my friends, we
+      shall prevail against the inquisitors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the alcove, Don Rodrigo felt his skin roughening with horror at
+      this speech, which breathed sedition not only against the Sovereigns, but
+      against the very Church. And with his horror was blent a certain increase
+      of fear. If his situation had been perilous before, it was tenfold more
+      dangerous now. Discovery, since he had overheard this treason, must mean
+      his certain death. And Isabella, realizing the same to the exclusion of
+      all else, clutched his arm and cowered against him in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was worse to follow. Susan's address was received with a murmur of
+      applause, and then others spoke, and several were named, and their
+      presence thus disclosed. There was the influential Manuel Sauli, who next
+      to Susan was the wealthiest man in Seville; there was Torralba, the
+      Governor of Triana; Juan Abolafio, the farmer of the royal customs, and
+      his brother Fernandez, the licentiate, and there were others&mdash;all of
+      them men of substance, some even holding office under the Crown. Not one
+      was there who dissented from anything that Susan had said; rather did each
+      contribute some spur to the general resolve. In the end it was concerted
+      that each of those present should engage himself to raise a proportion of
+      the men, arms and money that would be needed for their enterprise. And
+      upon that the meeting was dissolved, and they departed. Susan himself went
+      with them. He had work to do in the common cause, he announced, and he
+      would do it that very night in which it was supposed that he was absent at
+      Palacios.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, when all had gone, and the house was still again, Isabella and
+      her lover crept forth from their concealment, and in the light of the lamp
+      which Susan had left burning each looked into the other's white, startled
+      face. So shaken was Don Rodrigo with horror of what he had overheard, and
+      with the terror of discovery, that it was with difficulty he kept his
+      teeth from chattering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heaven protect us!&rdquo; he gasped. &ldquo;What Judaizing was this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Judaizing!&rdquo; she echoed. It was the term applied to apostacy, to the
+      relapse of New-Christians to Judaism, an offense to be expiated at the
+      stake. &ldquo;Here was no Judaizing. Are you mad, Rodrigo? You heard no single
+      word that sinned against the Faith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I not? I heard treason enough to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, nor treason either. You heard honourable, upright men considering
+      measures of defence against oppression, injustice, and evil
+      acquisitiveness masquerading in the holy garments of religion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared askance at her for a moment, then his full lips curled into a
+      sneer. &ldquo;Of course you would seek to justify them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are of
+      that foul brood yourself. But you cannot think to cozen me, who am of
+      clean Old-christian blood and a true son of Mother Church. These men plot
+      evil against the Holy Inquisition. Is that not Judaizing when it is done
+      by Jews?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from her great
+      dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult. Yet still she sought
+      to reason with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are not Jews&mdash;not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in holy
+      orders. All of them are Christians, and...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Newly-baptized!&rdquo; he broke in, sneering viciously. &ldquo;A defilement of that
+      holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is revealed by what
+      passed here just now. Jews they were born, the sons of Jews, and Jews they
+      remain under their cloak of mock Christianity, to be damned as Jews in the
+      end.&rdquo; He was panting now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal inflamed this
+      profligate defiler. &ldquo;God forgive me that ever I entered here. Yet I do
+      believe that it was His will that I should come to overhear what is being
+      plotted. Let me depart from hence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the door. Her
+      clutch upon his arm arrested him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither do you go?&rdquo; she asked him sharply. He looked now into her eyes,
+      and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw nothing of the
+      hatred into which her love had been transmuted in that moment by his
+      unsparing insults to herself, her race and her home, by the purpose which
+      she clearly read in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither my Christian duty bids me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her purpose, she
+      had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle, and armed with it
+      stood between the door and him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven watches
+      us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must talk awhile
+      before you go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine religious
+      zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak woman's hand. Rapidly
+      to-night was she coming into real knowledge of this Castilian gentleman,
+      whom with pride she had taken for her lover. It was a knowledge that was
+      to sear her presently with self-loathing and self-contempt. But for the
+      moment her only consideration was that, as a direct result of her own
+      wantonness, her father stood in mortal peril. If he should perish through
+      the deletion of this creature, she would account herself his slayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not considered that the deletion you intend will destroy my
+      father,&rdquo; she said quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is my Christian duty to consider,&rdquo; answered he, but without
+      boldness now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps. But there is something you must set against it. Have you no duty
+      as a lover&mdash;no duty to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No earthly duty can weigh against a spiritual obligation....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, wait! Have patience. You have not well considered, that is plain. In
+      coming here in secret you wronged my father. You will not trouble to deny
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jointly we wronged him, you and I. Will you then take advantage of
+      something learnt whilst you were hiding there like a thief from the
+      consequences of what you did, and so do him yet this further wrong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must I wrong my conscience?&rdquo; he asked her sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, I fear you must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Imperil my immortal soul?&rdquo; He almost laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk in vain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I have something more than words for you.&rdquo; With her left hand she
+      drew upon the fine gold chain about her neck, and brought forth a tiny
+      jewelled cross. Passing the chain over her head, she held it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take this,&rdquo; she bade him. &ldquo;Take it, I say. Now, with that sacred symbol
+      in your hand, make solemn oath to divulge no word of what you have learnt
+      here tonight, or else resign yourself to an unshriven death. For either
+      you take that oath, or I rouse the servants and have you dealt with as one
+      who has intruded here unbidden for an evil end.&rdquo; She backed away from him
+      as she spoke, and threw wide the door. Then, confronting him from the
+      threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder than a whisper.
+      &ldquo;Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with all your sins upon
+      you, and so destroy for all eternity the immortal soul that urges you to
+      this betrayal, or will you take the oath that I require?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she cut him
+      short. &ldquo;For the last time!&rdquo; she bade him. &ldquo;Will you decide?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
+      conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the words of
+      the formidable oath that she administered, an oath which it must damn his
+      immortal soul to break. Because of that, because she imagined that she had
+      taken the measure of his faith, she returned him his dagger, and let him
+      go at last. She imagined that she had bound him fast in irrefragable
+      spiritual bonds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had been present
+      at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by order of the Holy Office
+      of the Inquisition, she still clung to that belief. Yet presently a doubt
+      crept in, a doubt that she must at all costs resolve. And so presently she
+      called for her litter, and had herself carried to the Convent of St. Paul,
+      where she asked to see Frey Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the Dominicans
+      of Seville.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded
+      by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and a
+      praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging upon
+      one of its whitewashed walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thither came presently two Dominican friars. One of these was a
+      harsh-featured man of middle height and square build, the uncompromising
+      zealot Ojeda. The other was tall and lean, stooping slightly at the
+      shoulders, haggard and pale of countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark
+      eyes, and a tender, wistful mouth. This was the Queen's confessor, Frey
+      Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her,
+      leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her with
+      eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan,&rdquo; he said, in
+      a gentle voice. &ldquo;God help and strengthen you, my child, against the trials
+      that may be in store for you. What do you seek at our poor hands? Speak,
+      child, without fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father,&rdquo; she faltered, &ldquo;I come to implore your pity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No need to implore it, child. Should I withhold pity who stand myself in
+      need of pity, being a sinner&mdash;as are we all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So I supposed.&rdquo; A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the tender
+      melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. &ldquo;If your father is
+      innocent of what has been alleged against him, the benign tribunal of the
+      Holy Office will bring his innocence to light, and rejoice therein; if he
+      is guilty, if he has strayed&mdash;as we may all stray unless fortified by
+      heavenly grace&mdash;he shall be given the means of expiation, that his
+      salvation may be assured him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shivered at the words. She knew the mercy in which the inquisitors
+      dealt, a mercy so spiritual that it took no account of the temporal
+      agonies inflicted to ensure it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father is innocent of any sin against the Faith,&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you so sure?&rdquo; croaked the harsh voice of Ojeda, breaking in.
+      &ldquo;Consider well. Remember that your duty as a Christian is above your duty
+      as a daughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost had she bluntly demanded the name of her father's accuser, that
+      thus she might reach the object of her visit. Betimes she checked the rash
+      impulse, perceiving that subtlety was here required; that a direct
+      question would close the door to all information. Skilfully, then, she
+      chose her line of attack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure,&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;that he is a more fervent and pious Christian&mdash;New-Christian
+      though he be&mdash;than his accuser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The wistfulness faded from Torquemada's eyes. They grew keen, as became
+      the eyes of an inquisitor, the eyes of a sleuth, quick to fasten on a
+      spoor. But he shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ojeda advanced. &ldquo;That I cannot believe,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;The deletion was made
+      from a sense of duty so pure that the delator did not hesitate to confess
+      the sin of his own commission through which he had discovered the
+      treachery of Don Diego and his associates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could have cried out in anguish at this answer to her unspoken
+      question. Yet she controlled herself, and that no single doubt should
+      linger, she thrust boldly home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He confessed it?&rdquo; she cried, seemingly aghast. The friar slowly nodded.
+      &ldquo;Don Rodrigo confessed?&rdquo; she insisted, as will the incredulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abruptly the friar nodded again; and as abruptly checked, recollecting
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don Rodrigo?&rdquo; he echoed, and asked: &ldquo;Who mentioned Don Rodrigo?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was too late. His assenting nod had betrayed the truth, had
+      confirmed her worst fear. She swayed a little; the room swam round her,
+      she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation against that forsworn
+      betrayer surged to revive her. If it was through her weakness and
+      undutifulness that her father had been destroyed, through her strength
+      should he be avenged, though in doing so she pulled down and destroyed
+      herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he confessed to his own sin?&rdquo; she was repeating slowly, ever on that
+      musing, incredulous note. &ldquo;He dared confess himself a Judaizer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Judaizer!&rdquo; Sheer horror now overspread the friar's grim countenance. &ldquo;A
+      Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought you said he had confessed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes, but... but not to that.&rdquo; Her pale lips smiled, sadly
+      contemptuous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. He set limits of prudence upon his confession. He left out his
+      Judatting practices. He did not tell you, for instance, that this deletion
+      was an act of revenge against me who refused to marry him, having
+      discovered his unfaith, and fearing its consequences in this world and the
+      next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ojeda stared at her in sheer, incredulous amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Torquemada spoke: &ldquo;Do you say that Don Rodrigo de Cardona is a
+      Judaizer? Oh, it is unbelievable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I could give you evidence that should convince you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then so you shall. It is your sacred duty, lest you become an abettor of
+      heresy, and yourself liable to the extreme penalty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be a half-hour later, perhaps, when she quitted the Convent of
+      St. Paul to return home, with Hell in her heart, knowing in life no
+      purpose but that of avenging the parent her folly had destroyed. As she
+      was being carried past the Alcazar, she espied across the open space a
+      tall, slim figure in black, in whom she recognized her lover, and
+      straightway she sent the page who paced beside her litter to call him to
+      her side. The summons surprised him after what had passed between them;
+      moreover, considering her father's present condition, he was reluctant to
+      be seen in attendance upon the beautiful, wealthy Isabella de Susan.
+      Nevertheless, urged on by curiosity, he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her greeting increased his surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am in deep distress, Rodrigo, as you may judge,&rdquo; she told him sadly.
+      &ldquo;You will have heard what has befallen my father?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her sharply, yet saw nothing but loveliness rendered more
+      appealing by sorrow. Clearly she did not suspect him of betrayal; did not
+      realize that an oath extorted by violence&mdash;and an oath, moreover, to
+      be false to a sacred duty&mdash;could not be accounted binding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I... I heard of it an hour ago,&rdquo; he lied a thought unsteadily. &ldquo;I... I
+      commiserate you deeply.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I deserve commiseration,&rdquo; answered she, &ldquo;and so does my poor father, and
+      those others. It is plain that amongst those he trusted there was a
+      traitor, a spy, who went straight from that meeting to inform against
+      them. If I but had a list it were easy to discover the betrayer. One need
+      but ascertain who is the one of all who were present whose arrest has been
+      omitted.&rdquo; Her lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. &ldquo;What is to
+      become of me now, alone in the world?&rdquo; she asked him. &ldquo;My father was my
+      only friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw here a
+      noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your only friend?&rdquo; he asked her thickly. &ldquo;Was there no one else? Is there
+      no one else, Isabella?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; she said, and sighed heavily. &ldquo;But after what befell last
+      night, when... You know what is in my mind. I was distraught then, mad
+      with fear for this poor father of mine, so that I could not even consider
+      his sin in its full heinousness, nor see how righteous was your intent to
+      inform against him. Yet I am thankful that it was not by your deletion
+      that he was taken. The thought of that is to-day my only consolation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm to assist
+      her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to accompany her within.
+      But she denied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now&mdash;though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will
+      come and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more able to
+      receive you&mdash;that is, if I am forgiven for...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not another word,&rdquo; he begged her. &ldquo;I honour you for what you did. It is I
+      who should sue to you for forgiveness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!&rdquo; And so she
+      left him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had found him&mdash;had she but known it&mdash;a dejected, miserable
+      man in the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying Susan he
+      had acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage, and partly from a
+      sense of religious duty. In counting later the cost to himself, he cursed
+      the folly of his rage, and began to wonder if such strict observance of
+      religious duty was really worth while to a man who had his way to make in
+      the world. In short, he was in the throes of reaction. But now, in her
+      unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never know. The Holy
+      Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of deletions&mdash;since
+      to do otherwise might be to discourage delators&mdash;and there were no
+      confrontations of accuser and accused, such as took place in temporal
+      courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de Ataud better pleased with the world
+      than he had been since morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a servant
+      announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his hopes, and thereby
+      increased his longing. But on the next day he received from her a letter
+      which made him the most ample amends:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rodrigo,&mdash;There is a matter on which we must come early to an
+      understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and sentenced,
+      it follows that his property will be confiscated, since as the daughter of
+      a convicted heretic I may not inherit. For myself I care little; but I am
+      concerned for you, Rodrigo, since if in spite of what has happened you
+      would still wish to make me your wife, as you declared on Monday, it would
+      be my wish to come to you well dowered. Now the inheritance which would be
+      confiscated by the Holy Office from the daughter of a heretic might not be
+      so confiscated from the wife of a gentleman of Castile. I say no more.
+      Consider this well, and decide as your heart dictates. I shall receive you
+      to-morrow if you come to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isabella.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
+      consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His fortune was
+      estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it seemed, Rodrigo was
+      given the chance to make his own by marrying the beautiful Isabella at
+      once, before sentence came to be passed upon her father. The Holy Office
+      might impose a fine, but would not go further where the inheritance of a
+      Castilian nobleman of clean lineage was concerned. He was swayed between
+      admiration of her shrewdness and amazement at his own good fortune. Also
+      his vanity was immensely flattered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his resolve to
+      marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in person, as she had bidden
+      him, to carry out the resolve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She received him in the mansion's best room, a noble chamber furnished
+      with a richness such as no other house in Seville could have boasted. She
+      had arrayed herself for the interview with an almost wanton cunning that
+      should enhance her natural endowments. Her high-waisted gown, low-cut and
+      close-fitting in the bodice, was of cloth of gold, edged with miniver at
+      skirt and cuffs and neck. On her white bosom hung a priceless carcanet of
+      limpid diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of her bronze-coloured hair
+      was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never had Don Rodrigo found her
+      more desirable; never had he felt so secure and glad in his possession of
+      her. The quickening blood flushing now his olive face, he gathered her
+      slim shapeliness into his arms, kissing her cheek, her lips, her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!&rdquo; he murmured, rapturously. Then added
+      the impatient question: &ldquo;The priest? Where is the priest that shall make
+      us one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance. Languorously
+      she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a smile that
+      maddened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You love me, Rodrigo&mdash;in spite of all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love you!&rdquo; It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost inarticulate
+      ejaculation. &ldquo;Better than life&mdash;better than salvation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. &ldquo;Oh, I am glad&mdash;so
+      glad&mdash;that your love for me is truly strong. I am about to put it to
+      the test, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held her very close. &ldquo;What is this test, beloved?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
+      indissoluble save by death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, so do I,&rdquo; quoth he, who had so much to gain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, therefore, because after all, though I profess Christianity, there
+      is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a marriage that must satisfy
+      even my father when he regains his freedom, as I believe he will&mdash;for,
+      after all, he is not charged with any sin against the faith.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his ardour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; he asked her, and his voice was strained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean&mdash;you'll not be angry with me?&mdash;I mean that I would have
+      us married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner,
+      but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish
+      rites.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their
+      grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you'll not
+      deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife you
+      shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads of
+      sweat stood out upon his brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; he groaned. &ldquo;What do you ask? I... I can't. It were a
+      desecration, a defilement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She thrust him from her in a passion. &ldquo;You regard it so? You protest love,
+      and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you will not
+      make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the faith that was
+      my forbears', if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you, else I had not
+      bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought
+      to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted
+      torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she had
+      been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He could go
+      his ways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration, a
+      defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million maravedis,
+      and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished. There was
+      enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his condition, to make
+      the realization of that dream worth the defilement of the abominable
+      marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained where Christian
+      scruples were already half-effaced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not realize,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;If it were known that I so much as
+      contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of
+      apostasy, and send me to the fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If that were your only objection it were easily overcome,&rdquo; she informed
+      him coldly. &ldquo;For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is
+      waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's sake betray us, and who
+      else will ever know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can be sure of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his
+      turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten
+      in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage
+      that filled him with such repugnance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in which
+      the conspirators had met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the Rabbi?&rdquo; he asked impatiently, looking round that empty room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. &ldquo;Yet I would not
+      have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to this.&rdquo; They were odd
+      words; but he heeded not their oddness. He was hardly master of the wits
+      which in themselves were never of the brightest. &ldquo;I require you to declare
+      that it is your own desire that our marriage should be solemnized in
+      accordance with the Jewish rites and the law of Moses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing done and
+      ended, made answer hastily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be so
+      married&mdash;in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law of
+      Moses. And now, where is the Rabbi?&rdquo; He caught a sound and saw a quiver in
+      the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove. &ldquo;Ah! He is here, I
+      suppose....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his hands in
+      a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside, and forth stepped
+      not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt man, stooping slightly at the
+      shoulders, dressed in the white habit and black cloak of the order of St.
+      Dominic, his face lost in the shadows of a black cowl. Behind him stood
+      two lay brothers of the order, two armed familiars of the Holy Office,
+      displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those terribly
+      damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood blankly at gaze a
+      moment, not even seeking to understand how this dread thing had come to
+      pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the tender,
+      compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey Tomas de Torquemada.
+      And infinitely compassionate and wistful came the voice of that deeply
+      sincere and saintly man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My son, I was told this of you&mdash;that you were a Judaizer&mdash;yet
+      before I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in one of
+      your lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses. Oh, my poor child,
+      by what wicked counsels have you been led so far astray?&rdquo; The sweet,
+      tender eyes of the inquisitor were luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing
+      pity shook his gentle voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He
+      flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this. It
+      was a trap she baited for my undoing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I
+      was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the
+      trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you could
+      not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father! Hear me, I implore you!&rdquo; He flung down upon his knees, and held
+      out shaking, supplicating hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man
+      unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told that
+      your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be so,
+      trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your soul
+      to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good and
+      penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed for you.
+      Yet that you should Judaize&mdash;that you should be bound in wedlock by
+      the unclean ties of Judaism&mdash;Oh!&rdquo; The melancholy voice broke off upon
+      a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his hands&mdash;long,
+      white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. &ldquo;Pray now, my child, for grace
+      and strength,&rdquo; he exhorted. &ldquo;Offer up the little temporal suffering that
+      may yet be yours in atonement for your error, and so that your heart be
+      truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve salvation from that Divine
+      Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my prayers, my son. I can do no
+      more. Take him hence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first Auto
+      de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators, and
+      Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the ghastly
+      pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the essentials
+      were already present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of the
+      Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two by two the
+      members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the familiars of the
+      Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand, barefoot, in the
+      ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they
+      were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and
+      a sermon of the faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they
+      were conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the stake
+      and faggots awaited them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the accused.
+      Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged by
+      falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness the
+      instrument of her father's ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But
+      she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she
+      returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister
+      denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her
+      skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de
+      Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the
+      fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon
+      four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
+      legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty which
+      we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the natural
+      daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the Emperor
+      Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip II. of
+      Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more
+      utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the
+      dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural daughters&mdash;and
+      especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of cadency&mdash;there
+      was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a class apart; their
+      bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that spurious eminence.
+      Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with princes; their
+      bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore, since the world
+      would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it was expedient to withdraw
+      them from the world before its vanities beglamoured them, and to immure
+      them in convents, where they might aspire with confidence to the sterile
+      dignity of abbesshood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to the
+      Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence to the
+      Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was foreordained
+      that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She had youth, and
+      youth's hunger of life, and not even the repressive conditions in which
+      she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high spirit or in
+      concealing from her the fact that she was beautiful. On the threshold of
+      that convent which by her dread uncle's will was to be her living tomb,
+      above whose gates her spirit may have beheld the inscription, &ldquo;Lasciate
+      ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!&rdquo; she made her protest, called upon the
+      bishop who accompanied her to bear witness that she did not go of her own
+      free will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's was, under
+      God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the sacrifice
+      imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one of his own
+      blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges unusual to
+      members of religious communities: he granted her a little civil list&mdash;two
+      ladies-in-waiting and two grooms&mdash;and conferred upon her the title of
+      Excellency, which she still retained even when after her hurried novitiate
+      of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted where to have
+      striven would have been to have spent herself in vain; but her resignation
+      was only of the body, and this dejected body moved mechanically through
+      the tasks and recreations that go to make up the grey monotone of
+      conventual existence; in which one day is as another day, one hour as
+      another hour; in which the seasons of the year lose their significance; in
+      which time has no purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to
+      sleeping and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying and contemplating,
+      until life loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself into
+      preparation for death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained
+      unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her; in
+      time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey spirit of
+      the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she must nourish her
+      caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses caught in passing of the
+      bright, active, stirring world without; and where memory stopped she had
+      now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of high adventure and
+      romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but to feed and swell her
+      yearnings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the order
+      of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the great world
+      and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above all he loved to
+      talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with whom he had been
+      intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant, fair-haired lad
+      Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty had led the disastrous
+      overseas expedition against the Infidel, which had been shattered on the
+      field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants he had
+      seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was embarking with
+      crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights and men-at-arms, the
+      array of German and Italian mercenaries, the young king in his bright
+      armour, bare of head&mdash;an incarnation of St. Michael&mdash;moving
+      forward exultantly amid flowers and acclamations to take ship for Africa.
+      And she would listen with parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body
+      bending forward in her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic. Anon
+      when he came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir, her dark,
+      eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly truthful. He
+      did not say that military incompetence and a presumptuous vanity which
+      would listen to no counsels had been the cause of a ruin that had engulfed
+      the chivalry of Portugal, and finally the very kingdom itself. He
+      represented the defeat as due to the overwhelming numbers of the Infidel,
+      and dwelt at length upon the closing scene, told her in fullest detail how
+      Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of those who urged him to
+      fly when all was lost, how the young king, who had fought with a
+      lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day's defeat, had turned
+      and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to fight his last fight and
+      find a knightly death. Thereafter he was seen no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and more
+      deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with questions
+      touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning his ways of
+      life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the crown of
+      Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served but to engrave
+      more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of the knightly king.
+      Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent girl, his empanoplied
+      figure haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that her waking senses
+      would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the memory of someone
+      seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the memory of the dream&mdash;words
+      he had uttered, words it would seem begotten of the longings of her
+      starved and empty heart, words of a kind not calculated to bring peace to
+      the soul of a nun professed. She was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and
+      passionately enamoured of a myth, a mental image of a man who had been
+      dust these fifteen years. She mourned him with a fond widow's mourning;
+      prayed daily and nightly for the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation
+      waited now almost impatiently for death that should unite her with him.
+      Taking joy in the thought that she should go to him a maid, she ceased at
+      last to resent the maidenhood that had been imposed upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it so certain that he is dead?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;When all is said, none
+      actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by
+      Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not
+      possible that he may have survived?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not impatiently
+      scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Portugal,&rdquo; he answered slowly, &ldquo;it is firmly believed that he lives,
+      and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his
+      country from the thrall of Spain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then... then...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wistfully, he smiled. &ldquo;A people will always believe what it wishes to
+      believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you, yourself?&rdquo; she pressed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his
+      ascetic face. He half turned from her&mdash;they were standing in the
+      shadow of the fretted cloisters&mdash;and his pensive eyes roamed over the
+      wide quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground. Out
+      there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously pulsating
+      life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the
+      skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing
+      feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock, digging
+      their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the cloisters,
+      within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de Grado and Dona
+      Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King Philip to an office
+      as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as claustral conditions would
+      permit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to
+      preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted one who
+      had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned by a person of eminence to
+      have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only was he alive,
+      but he would be secretly present at the Requiem.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;was fifteen years ago, and since then I have had no
+      sign. At first I thought it possible... there was a story afloat that
+      might have been true... But fifteen years!&rdquo; He sighed, and shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What... what was the story?&rdquo; She was trembling from head to foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the gates of the
+      fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid guard refused to open to
+      them, they announced that one of them was King Sebastian, and so won
+      admittance. One of the three was wrapped in a cloak, his face concealed,
+      and his two companions were observed to show him the deference due to
+      royalty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, then...&rdquo; she was beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but afterwards,&rdquo; he interrupted her, &ldquo;afterwards, when all Portugal
+      was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied that King Sebastian
+      had been among these horsemen. It was affirmed to have been no more than a
+      ruse of those men's to gain the shelter of the city.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to draw from
+      him the admission that it was possible denial and explanation obeyed the
+      wishes of the hidden prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is possible,&rdquo; he admitted at length, &ldquo;and it is believed by many
+      to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-spirited. The shame
+      of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon him that he preferred to
+      remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a throne of which he now felt himself
+      unworthy. Half Portugal believes it so, and waits and hopes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the clear
+      conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who hoped more
+      fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or yearned more passionately
+      to acclaim him should he show himself. And that was much to think, for the
+      yearning of Portugal was as the yearning of the slave for freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sebastian's mother was King Philip's sister, whereby King Philip had
+      claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of Portugal.
+      Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that foreign rule, and Frey
+      Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply, passionately patriotic man, had been
+      foremost among those who had sought to liberate her. When Don Antonio, the
+      sometime Prior of Crato, Sebastian's natural cousin, and a bold,
+      ambitious, enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt, the friar
+      had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those days Frey
+      Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely renowned for his
+      learning and experience of affairs, who had been preacher to Don Sebastian
+      and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a vast influence in Portugal.
+      That influence he had unstintingly exerted on behalf of the Pretender, to
+      whom he was profoundly devoted. After Don Antonio's army had been defeated
+      on land by the Duke of Alba, and his fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582
+      by the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised
+      by his active share in the rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long
+      imprisonment in Spain. In the end, because he expressed repentance, and
+      because Philip II., aware of the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach
+      him to himself by gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa
+      Maria la Real, where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant
+      of the Princess Anne of Austria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his nature,
+      to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio&mdash;who,
+      restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad&mdash;or yet to
+      abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever the
+      independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne. And
+      because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into
+      conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to claim
+      his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the great stream
+      of life, were drawn more closely to each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered and the
+      deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she
+      reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon a
+      reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening in the spring of 1594&mdash;four years after the name of
+      Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess&mdash;Frey
+      Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose every
+      inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face with a
+      stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention, but there
+      was about this man something familiar to the friar, something that stirred
+      in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of shabby black
+      was that of a common townsman, but there was something in his air and
+      glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded chin, that
+      belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of intrepidity and
+      assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips of the
+      stranger&mdash;who, in the fading light, might have been of any age from
+      thirty to fifty&mdash;a puzzled frown upon the brow of the friar. Then the
+      man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God save your paternity,&rdquo; was his greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God save you, my son,&rdquo; replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him. &ldquo;I seem
+      to know you. Do I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger laughed. &ldquo;Though all the world forget, your paternity should
+      remember me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; he cried, and
+      set a hand upon the fellow's shoulder, looking deeply into those bold,
+      grey eyes. &ldquo;What make you here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am a pastry-cook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A pastry-cook? You?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
+      Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the Convent
+      here, and so for the sake of old times&mdash;of happier times&mdash;I
+      bethought me that I might claim your paternity's support.&rdquo; He spoke with a
+      careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuredly...&rdquo; began the priest, and then he checked. &ldquo;Where is your
+      shop?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
+      celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went
+      straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour,
+      desired to see her Excellency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lady,&rdquo; he told her, &ldquo;I have great news; news that will rejoice your
+      heart.&rdquo; She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken
+      eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. &ldquo;Don Sebastian lives.
+      I have seen him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled
+      until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her brow; her breath
+      came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet, and caught
+      at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from falling. He saw
+      that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the
+      full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared
+      that she would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly
+      delivered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say? Oh, what do you say?&rdquo; she moaned, her eyes half-closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all the
+      magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she quelled
+      the storm of her emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you say that you have seen him? Oh!&rdquo; Once more the colour suffused
+      her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. &ldquo;Where is
+      he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here. Here in Madrigal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Madrigal?&rdquo; She was all amazement. &ldquo;But why in Madrigal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I&mdash;his sometime preacher
+      and counsellor&mdash;was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to
+      seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa,
+      and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be
+      completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his
+      impatiently awaiting people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in turmoil,
+      made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful fear. This
+      dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant companion of her
+      thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative, starved Soul had come to
+      love with a consuming passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be
+      seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her
+      in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to bring
+      Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and so elicited
+      from him a very circumstantial story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy
+      Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he had
+      proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had brought
+      him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his bread by the
+      labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any common hind, until
+      he should have purged his offense and rendered himself worthy once more to
+      resume the estate to which he had been born.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her
+      hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams,
+      particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that
+      followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince. At
+      last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his
+      presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel
+      proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these
+      years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply touched. He desires
+      your leave to come and prostrate himself at your feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom heaved in
+      tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint consent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour, where her
+      Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in the background.
+      Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle height, dignified of
+      mien and carriage, dressed with extreme simplicity, yet without the
+      shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had first discovered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His hair was of a light brown&mdash;the colour to which the golden locks
+      of the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago might well
+      have faded&mdash;his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes were grey. His
+      face was handsome, and save for the colour of his eyes and the high arch
+      of his nose presented none of the distinguishing and marring features
+      peculiar to the House of Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through
+      his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am here to receive your Excellency's commands,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up as a
+      pastry-cook?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To serve your Excellency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least understand is
+      that of a pastry-cook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should not now be
+      reduced to following this one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between them was
+      very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a promise to come soon
+      again, and the undertaking on her side to procure for his shop the
+      patronage of the convent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass celebrated by
+      Frey Miguel in the convent chapel&mdash;which was open to the public&mdash;and
+      afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy and accompany him thence to
+      the convent parlour, where the Princess waited, usually with one or
+      another of her attendant nuns. These daily interviews were brief at first,
+      but gradually they lengthened until they came to consume the hours to
+      dinner-time, and presently even that did not suffice, and Sebastian must
+      come again later in the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also in
+      intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's future came to
+      be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself. His penance had been
+      overlong already for what was really no fault at all, since it is the
+      heart rather than the deed that Heaven judges, and his heart had been
+      pure, his intention in making war upon the Infidel loftily pious.
+      Diffidently he admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel
+      were of opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
+      II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be long
+      delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip might oppose
+      Sebastian's claims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he spent in
+      Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal, within and
+      without the convent. She was a nun professed, interdicted from seeing any
+      man but her confessor other than through the parlour grating, and even
+      then not at such length or with such constancy as this. The intimacy
+      between them&mdash;fostered and furthered by Frey Miguel&mdash;had so
+      ripened in a few weeks that Anne was justified in looking upon him as her
+      saviour from the living tomb to which she had been condemned, in hoping
+      that he would restore her to the life and liberty for which she had ever
+      yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his own. What
+      if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been against her will,
+      preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she was still within the five
+      probationary years prescribed. Therefore, in her view, her vows were
+      revocable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or knowledge, and
+      so the scandal grew. Within the convent there was none bold enough,
+      considering Anne's royal rank, to offer remonstrance or advice,
+      particularly too, considering that her behaviour had the sanction of Frey
+      Miguel, the convent's spiritual adviser. But from without, from the
+      Provincial of the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
+      respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous visits she
+      received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk, for which it would
+      be wise to cease to give occasion. That recommendation scorched her proud,
+      sensitive soul with shame. She sent her servant Roderos at once to fetch
+      Frey Miguel, and placed the letter in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was to have been feared,&rdquo; he said, and sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined. Don
+      Sebastian must go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go?&rdquo; Fear robbed her of breath. &ldquo;Go where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Away from Madrigal&mdash;anywhere&mdash;and at once; tomorrow at latest.&rdquo;
+       And then, seeing the look of horror in her face, &ldquo;What else, what else?&rdquo;
+       he added, impatiently. &ldquo;This meddlesome provincial may be stirring up
+      trouble already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She fought down her emotion. &ldquo;I... I shall see him before he goes?&rdquo; she
+      begged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider.&rdquo; He flung away in
+      deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life was slipping from
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room, hoping
+      against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona Maria de Grado
+      brought word that Espinosa was even then in the convent in Frey Miguel's
+      cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled thence without her seeing him,
+      And careless of the impropriety of the hour&mdash;it was already eight
+      o'clock and dusk was falling&mdash;she at once dispatched Roderos to the
+      friar, bidding him bring Espinosa to her in the parlour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The friar obeyed, and the lovers&mdash;they were no less by now&mdash;came
+      face to face in anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord, my lord,&rdquo; she cried, casting all prudence to the winds, &ldquo;what is
+      decided?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I leave in the morning,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To go where?&rdquo; She was distraught.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo; He shrugged. &ldquo;To Valladolid at first, and then... where God
+      pleases.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when shall I see you again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When... when God pleases.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I am terrified... if I should lose you... if I should never see you
+      more!&rdquo; She was panting, distraught.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, lady, nay,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I shall come for you when the time is
+      ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at the latest, and I
+      shall bring with me one who will avouch me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What need any to avouch you to me?&rdquo; she protested, on a note of
+      fierceness. &ldquo;We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free to roam
+      the world, and I am caged here and helpless...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together. See.&rdquo; He
+      stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of pounce, some quills,
+      and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a quill, and wrote with labour, for
+      princes are notoriously poor scholars:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to wife the
+      most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most serene Prince, Don
+      John of Austria, by virtue of the dispensation which I hold from two
+      pontiffs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he signed it&mdash;after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in all
+      ages&mdash;&ldquo;El Rey&rdquo;&mdash;the King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will that content you, lady?&rdquo; he pleaded, handing it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How shall this scrawl content me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey Miguel
+      urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot her own grief,
+      and became all solicitude for him, until naught would content her but she
+      must empty into his hands her little store of treasure&mdash;a hundred
+      ducats and such jewels as she possessed, including a gold watch set with
+      diamonds and a ring bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of
+      all a portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel had gone on
+      his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he had passionately urged
+      him not to linger; and then Sebastian had done the same by the Princess
+      both weeping now. At last he was gone, and on the arm of Dona Maria de
+      Grado the forlorn Anne staggered back to her cell to weep and pray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed by her
+      sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last she sought to
+      mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither he had repaired. Of all
+      those letters only two survive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My king and lord,&rdquo; she wrote in one of these, &ldquo;alas! How we suffer by
+      absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I did not seek the
+      relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend some moments in communion
+      with you, there would be an end to me. What I feel to-day is what I feel
+      every day when I recall the happy moments so deliciously spent, which are
+      no more. This privation is for me so severe a punishment of heaven that I
+      should call it unjust, for without cause I find myself deprived of the
+      happiness missed by me for so many years and purchased at the price of
+      suffering and tears. Ah, my lord, how willingly, nevertheless, would I not
+      suffer all over again the misfortunes that have crushed me if thus I might
+      spare your Majesty the least of them. May He who rules the world grant my
+      prayers and set a term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable
+      torment I suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty.
+      It were impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I plighted to
+      you I shall keep in life and in death, for death itself could not tear it
+      from my soul, and this immortal soul will harbour it through eternity...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King Philip of
+      Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his Valladolid retreat. How
+      he filled his days we do not know, beyond the fact that he moved freely
+      abroad. For it was in the streets of that town that meddlesome Fate
+      brought him face to face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom
+      Espinosa had been a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's garments
+      were not in their first freshness they were far from being those of a
+      plebeian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In whose service may you be now?&rdquo; quoth the intrigued Gregorio, so soon
+      as greetings had passed between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand of his
+      sometime comrade. &ldquo;Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I am not in
+      anybody's service, rather do I require servants myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what is your present situation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Loftily Espinosa put him off. &ldquo;No matter for that,&rdquo; he answered, with a
+      dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his cloak about him to
+      proceed upon his way. &ldquo;If there is anything you wish for I shall be happy,
+      for old times' sake, to oblige you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not readily
+      part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an unsuspected state of
+      affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio. Gregorio's wife would be
+      charmed to renew his acquaintance, and to hear from his own lips of his
+      improved and prosperous state. Gregorio would take no refusal, and in the
+      end Espinosa, yielding to his insistence, went with him to the sordid
+      quarter where Gregorio had his dwelling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the three&mdash;Espinosa,
+      Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter displayed none of the signs
+      of satisfaction at Espinosa's prosperity which Gregorio had promised.
+      Perhaps Espinosa observed her evil envy, and it may have been to nourish
+      it&mdash;which is the surest way to punish envy&mdash;that he made
+      Gregorio a magnificent offer of employment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enter my service,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and I will pay you fifty ducats down and
+      four ducats a month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince them he
+      displayed a gold watch&mdash;most rare possession&mdash;set with diamonds,
+      a ring of price, and other costly jewels. The couple stared now with
+      dazzled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you had been
+      a pastry-cook at Ocana?&rdquo; burst from Gregorio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Espinosa smiled. &ldquo;How many kings and princes have been compelled to
+      conceal themselves under disguises?&rdquo; he asked oracularly. And seeing them
+      stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it seems, was sacred to
+      him&mdash;not even the portrait of that lovely, desolate royal lady in her
+      convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked it, and thrust it to them across the
+      stains of wine and oil that befouled their table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain,&rdquo; he bade them.
+      &ldquo;A prince could not have a lovelier bride.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she is dressed as a nun,&rdquo; the woman protested. &ldquo;How, then, can she
+      marry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For kings there are no laws,&rdquo; he told her with finality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer he had
+      made him. He would come again for the cook's reply, leaving word meanwhile
+      of where he was lodged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the woman's
+      disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous fear that what he
+      had told them of himself might, after all, be true. Upon that malevolence
+      she acted forthwith, lodging an information with Don Rodrigo de Santillan,
+      the Alcalde of Valladolid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find his room
+      invaded by alguaziles&mdash;the police of the Alcalde. He was arrested and
+      dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of himself and of certain
+      objects of value found in his possession&mdash;more particularly of a
+      ring, on the cameo of which was carved a portrait of King Philip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Gabriel de Espinosa,&rdquo; he answered firmly, &ldquo;a pastry-cook of
+      Madrigal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then how come you by these jewels?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her account. That
+      is the business that has brought me to Valladolid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this Dona Ana's portrait?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you, then, pretend
+      that these were also given you to sell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why else should they be given me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as for the
+      lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for that? The Alcalde
+      conned his man more closely, and noted that dignity of bearing, that calm
+      assurance which usually is founded upon birth and worth. He sent him to
+      wait in prison, what time he went to ransack the fellow's house in
+      Madrigal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously
+      found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the
+      Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival, the friar had abstracted from
+      Espinosa's house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes. Unfortunately
+      Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided to the box were
+      discovered by the alguaziles. Two of them were from Anne&mdash;one of
+      which supplies the extract I have given; the other two from Frey Miguel
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd reasoner
+      and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile was kept on the
+      alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender, Don
+      Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past life of
+      Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and passionate devotion
+      to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of his prisoner,
+      and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his hands&mdash;the man
+      whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms by the title of
+      Majesty&mdash;was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he had stumbled
+      here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered the arrest of Frey
+      Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana at the convent. His methods
+      were crafty, and depended upon the effect of surprise. He opened the
+      interview by holding up before her one of the letters he had found, asking
+      her if she acknowledged it for her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his hands, tore
+      it across, and would have torn again, but that he caught her wrists in a
+      grip of iron to prevent her, with little regard in that moment for the
+      blood royal in her veins. King Philip was a stern master, pitiless to
+      blunderers, and Don Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he suffer
+      that precious letter to be destroyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments and
+      confessed the letter her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-cook, and
+      to whom you write in such terms as these?&rdquo; quoth the magistrate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal.&rdquo; And to that declaration she added
+      briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir and subsequent
+      penitential wanderings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but convinced
+      that it was time he laid the whole matter before King Philip. His Catholic
+      Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once dispatched Don Juan de Llano, the
+      Apostolic Commissary of the Holy Office to Madrigal to sift the matter,
+      and ordered that Anne should be solitarily confined in her cell, and her
+      nuns-in-waiting and servants placed under arrest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the prison of
+      Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with an escort of
+      arquebusiers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?&rdquo; he asked his guards,
+      half-mockingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos, a
+      travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that he spoke
+      both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos addressed him in
+      Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and replied that although he had
+      been in Portugal, he could not speak the language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three chief
+      prisoners&mdash;Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne&mdash;succeeded
+      one another with a wearisome monotony of results. The Apostolic Commissary
+      interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel; Don Rodrigo conducted the
+      examinations of Espinosa. But nothing was elicited that took the matter
+      forward or tended to dispel its mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The princess replied with a candour that became more and more tinged with
+      indignation under the persistent and at times insulting interrogatories.
+      She insisted that the prisoner was Don Sebastian, and wrote passionate
+      letters to Espinosa, begging him for her honour's sake to proclaim himself
+      what he really was, declaring to him that the time had come to cast off
+      all disguise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was Gabriel
+      de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and the air of mystery
+      cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie that asseveration. That he
+      could not be the Prior of Crato, Don Rodrigo had now assured himself. He
+      fenced skilfully under examination, ever evading the magistrate's
+      practiced point when it sought to pin him, and he was no less careful to
+      say nothing that should incriminate either of the other two prisoners. He
+      denied that he had ever given himself out to be Don Sebastian, though he
+      admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had persuaded themselves that
+      he was that lost prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating that he had
+      never known either of them&mdash;an answer this which would have fitted
+      the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after his father's death, and
+      quitted in early infancy by his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction that
+      Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the belief that
+      Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He protested that he had acted
+      in good faith throughout, and without any thought of disloyalty to the
+      King of Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison, Espinosa
+      was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the Alcalde. At once he
+      would have risen and dressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, &ldquo;that is not necessary for what
+      is intended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with tousled
+      hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly interpreted into
+      a threat of torture. His face grew white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is impossible,&rdquo; he protested. &ldquo;The King cannot have ordered what you
+      suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a man of honour. He
+      may require my death, but in an honourable manner, and not upon the rack.
+      And as for its being used to make me speak, I have nothing to add to what
+      I have said already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions. Sometimes you
+      pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and sometimes a person of
+      honourable degree. To hear you at this moment one might suppose that to
+      submit you to torture would be to outrage your dignity. What then...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch from the
+      hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of the prisoner, who
+      cowered now, knowing full well what it was the Alcalde had detected. In
+      that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that the prisoner's hair and beard had
+      turned grey at the roots, and so received the last proof that he had to do
+      with the basest of impostures. The fellow had been using dyes, the supply
+      of which had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo departed
+      well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too late, and
+      even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded to its natural
+      grey, and he presented the appearance of what in fact he was&mdash;a man
+      of sixty, or thereabouts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from him
+      that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from Frey Miguel,
+      after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations, that the full truth&mdash;known
+      to himself alone&mdash;was extracted by the rack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent desire
+      to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never abandoned the
+      hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio, the Prior of Crato, on
+      the throne of his ancestors. He had devised a plan, primarily inspired by
+      the ardent nature of the Princess Anne and her impatience of the
+      conventual life. It was while casting about for the chief instrument that
+      he fortuitously met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa had been
+      a soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain and
+      Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had befriended Frey
+      Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point of being invaded by
+      soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril of it. Thus they had become
+      acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had an instance of the man's resource and
+      courage. Further, he was of the height of Don Sebastian and of the build
+      to which the king might have grown in the years that were sped, and he
+      presented other superficial resemblances to the late king. The colour of
+      his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be made to play the
+      part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was waiting so
+      passionately and confidently. There had been other impostors aforetime,
+      but they had lacked the endowments of Espinosa, and their origins could be
+      traced without difficulty. In addition to these natural endowments,
+      Espinosa should be avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody in the world
+      was better qualified in such a matter&mdash;and by the niece of King
+      Philip, to whom he would be married when he raised his standard. It was
+      arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the arrangements
+      were complete, where the Pretender would be accredited by the exiled
+      friends of Don Antonio residing there&mdash;the Prior of Crato being a
+      party to the plot. From France Frey Miguel would have worked in Portugal
+      through his agents, and presently would have gone there himself to stir up
+      a national movement in favour of a pretender so fully accredited. Thus he
+      had every hope of restoring Portugal to her independence. Once this should
+      have been accomplished, Don Antonio would appear in Lisbon, unmask the
+      impostor, and himself assume the crown of the kingdom which had been
+      forcibly and definitely wrenched from Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a singleness of
+      aim and a detachment from minor considerations that never hesitated to
+      sacrifice the princess, together with the chief instrument of the
+      intrigue. Was the liberation of a kingdom, the deliverance of a nation
+      from servitude, the happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance
+      against the fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a
+      soldier of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
+      plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in Espinosa and the
+      man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to dazzle the Gonzales at
+      Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to the end, which he suffered in
+      October of 1595, a full year after his arrest. To the last he avoided
+      admissions that should throw light upon his obscure identity and origin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it were known who I am...&rdquo; he would say, and there break off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with calm
+      fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the like dignity,
+      after having undergone degradation from his priestly dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of shame and
+      humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the previous July. The
+      Apostolic Commissary notified her of the sentence which King Philip had
+      confirmed. She was to be transferred to another convent, there to undergo
+      a term of four years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to fast on
+      bread and water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of ever holding
+      any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term as an ordinary
+      nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency to be extinguished,
+      together with all other honours and privileges conferred upon her by King
+      Philip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the King, her
+      uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable Philip of Spain
+      unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the hunger of her starved
+      heart, and chafing under the ascetic life imposed upon her, she had allowed
+      herself to be fascinated by the prospect of becoming the protectress of
+      one whom she believed to be an unfortunate and romantic prince, and of
+      exchanging her convent for a throne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her punishment&mdash;poor soul&mdash;endured for close upon forty years,
+      but the most terrible part of it was not that which lay within the
+      prescription of King Philip, but that which arose from her own broken and
+      humiliated spirit. She had been uplifted a moment by a glorious hope, to
+      be cast down again into the blackest despair, to which a shame unspeakable
+      and a tortured pride were added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V. THE END OF THE &ldquo;VERT GALANT&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Assassination of Henry IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV. of
+      France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In their conjunction these two events were to influence the destinies of
+      Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough, since it was as much a
+      commonplace that an old gentleman should die as that Henry of Bearn should
+      fall in love. Love had been the main relaxation of his otherwise strenuous
+      life, and neither the advancing years&mdash;he was fifty-six at this date&mdash;nor
+      the recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his long-suffering Florentine
+      wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King Henry;
+      probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in
+      women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his
+      grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from the
+      latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his
+      self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned
+      Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
+      adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in the
+      affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I have said,
+      in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is difficult, without being
+      ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a girl of twenty. Unfortunately for
+      him, Charlotte does not appear to have found him so. On the contrary, her
+      lovely, empty head was so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that
+      she came to reciprocate the passion she inspired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal de
+      Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged, the marshal
+      found the match extremely suitable, and was willing enough, until the King
+      declared himself. Henry used the most impudent frankness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I am in love,
+      and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency. If you should
+      marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would hate me. A
+      breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you with sincere
+      affection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a
+      marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give him
+      to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent husband and
+      being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much, and thanked the
+      King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him more than ever for his
+      good sense, further opened his mind to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have her
+      in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on. Conde,
+      who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand livres a
+      year with which to amuse himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in Henry's
+      mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less acute, no
+      doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a hundred thousand
+      livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half that sum he would
+      have taken Lucifer's own daughter to wife, without stopping to consider
+      the disadvantages it might entail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609.
+      Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely what
+      was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the Queen, too,
+      was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini and his wife
+      Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come from Florence in
+      her train, and who saw in the King's weakness their own opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations
+      between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point. And
+      then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own making was growing about him until
+      it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his
+      ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance
+      into stark apprehension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, &ldquo;leaving all the
+      world his heirs&rdquo;&mdash;to use Henry's own phrase&mdash;the Emperor had
+      stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had
+      bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was
+      an arrangement that did not suit Henry's policy at all, and being then&mdash;as
+      the result of a wise husbanding of resources&mdash;the most powerful
+      prince in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements
+      that did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the
+      difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of this
+      matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the Dauphin
+      to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be united
+      with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was now
+      disposed to attach the German princes to his interests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents at the
+      court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine ambassador, acting
+      upon instructions from certain members of the household of the Queen of
+      France, and from others whom Vaucelas said he dared not mention, were
+      intriguing to blast Henry's designs against the house of Austria, and to
+      bring him willy-nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so
+      far in their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
+      the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a marriage
+      between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal, where
+      Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien de Bethune,
+      Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he was his closest
+      friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King leaned upon him and
+      sought his guidance not only in State affairs, but in the most intimate
+      and domestic matters. Often already had it fallen to Sully to patch up the
+      differences created between husband and wife by Henry's persistent
+      infidelities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of the closet
+      in which the duke&mdash;but newly risen&mdash;received him in bed-gown and
+      night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came abruptly to the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard what is being said of me?&rdquo; he burst out. He stood with his
+      back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a little above the
+      middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune in jerkin and long boots
+      of grey leather, and a grey hat with a wine-coloured ostrich plume. His
+      countenance matched his raiment. Keeneyed, broad of brow, with a
+      high-bridged, pendulous nose, red lips, a tuft of beard and a pair of
+      grizzled, bristling moustachios, he looked half-hero, half-satyr;
+      half-Captain, half-Polichinelle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and dignity,
+      despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering his high, bald
+      crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?&rdquo; quoth he, and gravely
+      he shook his head. &ldquo;It is a matter that has filled me with apprehension,
+      for I foresee from it far greater trouble than from any former attachment
+      of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?&rdquo; Henry's tone was almost
+      sorrowful. &ldquo;Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated. It is the work of
+      that dog Concini. <i>Ventre St. Gris!</i> If he has no respect for me, at least
+      he might consider how he slanders a child of such grace and wit and
+      beauty, a lady of her high birth and noble lineage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not missed
+      by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window, and flung into a
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her to take
+      violent resolutions which might give colour to their pernicious designs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sire!&rdquo; It was a cry of protest from Sully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked forth the
+      letter from Vaucelas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated: &ldquo;They
+      must be mad!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said the King. &ldquo;They are not mad. They are most wickedly sane,
+      which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What do you infer,
+      Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against resolutions from which
+      they know that nothing can turn me while I have life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can I infer?&rdquo; quoth Sully, aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In acting thus&mdash;in daring to act thus,&rdquo; the King expounded, &ldquo;they
+      proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sire!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied silence, his
+      loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery the truth that he
+      perceived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sire,&rdquo; he said at last, bowing his fine head, &ldquo;you must take your
+      measures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare not name?
+      Can you suggest another than...&rdquo; He paused, shrinking in horror from
+      completing the utterance of his thought. Then, with an abrupt gesture, he
+      went on, &ldquo;... than the Queen herself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He took his
+      chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated her
+      Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the councils
+      of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of yours that did
+      not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble as I have been
+      foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you
+      not consider where you stand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are lies, I tell you,&rdquo; Henry stormed. But Sully the uncompromising
+      gravely shook his head. &ldquo;At least,&rdquo; Henry amended, &ldquo;they are gross
+      exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am sick with love
+      of her. Day and night I see nothing but her gracious image. I sigh and
+      fret and fume like any callow lad of twenty. I suffer the tortures of the
+      damned. And yet... and yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb this
+      passion though it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they consume
+      my soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm has come yet.
+      I swear it. These stories that are put about are the inventions of Concini
+      to set my wife against me. Do you know how far he and his wife have dared
+      to go? They have persuaded the Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared
+      in the kitchen they have set up for her in their own apartments. What can
+      you conclude from that but that they suggest that I desire to poison her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why suffer it, sire?&rdquo; quoth Sully gravely. &ldquo;Send the pair packing back to
+      Florence, and so be rid of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Henry rose in agitation. &ldquo;I have a mind to. <i>Ventre St. Gris!</i> I have a mind
+      to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it, Sully. Disabuse her mind
+      of her Suspicions regarding the Princess of Conde; make my peace with her;
+      convince her of my sincerity, of my firm intention to have done with
+      gallantry, so that she on her side will make me the sacrifice of banishing
+      the Concinis. You will do this, my friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past experience, and the
+      task was one in which he was by now well-practiced; but the situation had
+      never before been quite so difficult. He rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, surely, sire,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;But her Majesty on her side may require
+      something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may reopen the
+      question of her coronation so long and&mdash;in her view&mdash;so
+      unreasonably postponed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. &ldquo;I have always had an instinct
+      against it, as you know, Grand Master,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and this instinct is
+      strengthened by what that letter has taught me. If she will dare so much,
+      having so little real power, what might she not do if...&rdquo; He broke off,
+      and fell to musing. &ldquo;If she demands it we must yield, I suppose,&rdquo; he said
+      at length. &ldquo;But give her to understand that if I discover any more of her
+      designs with Spain I shall be provoked to the last degree against her. And
+      as an antidote to these machinations at Madrid you may publish my
+      intention to uphold the claims of the German Princes in the matter of
+      Cleves, and let all the world know that we are arming to that end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He may have thought&mdash;as was long afterwards alleged&mdash;that the
+      threat itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no power in
+      Europe that could have stood against his armies in the field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that Henry should
+      see the Princesse de Conde no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and respect the
+      sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte solely so that I might
+      impose silence upon my own passion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: &ldquo;I should have relied
+      absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy it is for a
+      heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive itself&rdquo;&mdash;which is
+      the most amiable conceivable way of saying that he attached not the
+      slightest faith to the King's promise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between the royal
+      couple with all the skill and tact that experience had taught him; and he
+      might have driven a good bargain on his master's behalf but for his
+      master's own weakness in supporting him. Maria de' Medici would not hear
+      of the banishment of the Concinis, to whom she was so deeply attached. She
+      insisted with perfect justice that she was a bitterly injured woman, and
+      refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save with the condition
+      that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of France&mdash;which was no
+      more than her due&mdash;should be made at once, and that the King should
+      give an undertaking not to make himself ridiculous any longer by his
+      pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of the matters contained in the letter
+      of Vaucelas she denied all knowledge, nor would suffer any further
+      inquisition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory. But he
+      yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged her so much in
+      one way that he must make some compensating concessions to her in another.
+      This weakness was part of his mental attitude towards her, which swung
+      constantly between confidence and diffidence, esteem and indifference,
+      affection and coldness; at times he inclined to put her from him entirely;
+      at others he opined that no one on his Council was more capable of the
+      administration of affairs. Even in the indignation aroused by the proof he
+      held of her disloyalty, he was too just not to admit the provocation he
+      had given her. So he submitted to a reconciliation on her own terms, and
+      pledged himself to renounce Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the
+      sequel that he was not sincere in the intention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's judgment. The
+      court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of Henry's prudence was
+      battered down by the vanity of that lovely fool, Charlotte, who must be
+      encouraging her royal lover to resume his flattering homage. But both
+      appear to have reckoned without the lady's husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of eighteen thousand
+      livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont au Change; and
+      you conceive what the charitable ladies of the Court had to say about it.
+      At the first hint of scandal Monsieur de Conde put himself into a fine
+      heat, and said things which pained and annoyed the King exceedingly. Henry
+      had amassed a considerable and varied experience of jealous husbands in
+      his time; but he had never met one quite so intolerable as this nephew of
+      his. He complained of it in a letter to Sully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&mdash;Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
+      possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of me. I
+      shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile I am obliged
+      to talk to him with severity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to withhold
+      payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance, and to give
+      refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he intended also, no doubt,
+      to make it clear to Conde that he did not receive a pension of a hundred
+      thousand livres a year for nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If this does not keep him in bounds,&rdquo; Henry concluded, &ldquo;we must think of
+      some other method, for he says the most injurious things of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So little did it keep the prince in bounds&mdash;as Henry understood the
+      phrase&mdash;that he immediately packed his belongings, and carried his
+      wife off to his country house. It was quite in vain that Henry wrote to
+      him representing that this conduct was dishonouring to them both, and that
+      the only place for a prince of the blood was the court of his sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took to
+      night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the disguise of a
+      peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre, whose will was law in
+      Europe, shivering behind damp hedges, ankle-deep in wet grass, spending
+      long hours in love-lore, ecstatic contemplation of her lighted window, and
+      all&mdash;so far as we can gather&mdash;for no other result than the
+      aggravation of certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him
+      that he was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded. Henry had
+      been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he strayed from the path
+      of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw to that. And when they judged
+      the season ripe, they put her Majesty in possession of the facts. So
+      inflamed was she by this fresh breach of trust that war was declared anew
+      between the royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours could
+      now accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde took the
+      desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife, without troubling&mdash;as
+      was his duty&mdash;to obtain the King's consent. On the last night of that
+      month, as Henry was at cards in the Louvre, the Chevalier du Guet brought
+      him the news of the prince's flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never in my life,&rdquo; says Bassompierre, who was present, &ldquo;saw a man so
+      distracted or in so violent a passion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing over behind
+      him. &ldquo;I am undone!&rdquo; was his cry. &ldquo;Undone! This madman has carried off his
+      wife&mdash;perhaps to kill her.&rdquo; White and shaking, he turned to
+      Bassompierre. &ldquo;Take care of my money,&rdquo; he bade him, &ldquo;and go on with the
+      game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the Arsenal to
+      fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came at once, but in an
+      extremely bad temper, for it was late at night, and he was overburdened
+      with work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and forward,
+      his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind him. The Queen, a
+      squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart, attended by a few of her
+      ladies and one or two gentlemen of her train. Her countenance was set and
+      inscrutable, and her brooding eyes were fixed upon the King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, Grand Master!&rdquo; was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and strained.
+      &ldquo;What do you say to this? What is to be done now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing at all, sire,&rdquo; says Sully, as calm as his master was excited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing! What sort of advice is that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be talked
+      of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of any consequence to
+      you, or capable of giving you the least uneasiness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Queen cleared her throat huskily. &ldquo;Good advice, Monsieur le Duc,&rdquo; she
+      approved him. &ldquo;He will be wise to follow it.&rdquo; Her voice strained, almost
+      threatening. &ldquo;But, in this matter, I doubt wisdom and he have long since
+      become strangers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the maddest
+      thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and with a patch over
+      one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in pursuit of the fugitives.
+      He had learnt that they had taken the road to Landrecy, which was enough
+      for him. Stage by stage he followed them in that flight to Flanders,
+      picking up the trail as he went, and never pausing until he had reached
+      the frontier without overtaking them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it, shed tears
+      of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned letters in which she
+      addressed him as her knight, and implored him, as he loved her, to come
+      and deliver her from the detestable tyrant who held her in thrall. Those
+      perfervid appeals completed his undoing, drove him mad, and blinded him to
+      everything&mdash;even to the fact that his wife, too, was shedding tears,
+      and that these were of rage undiluted by any more tender emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the Prince of
+      Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke declined with dignity
+      to be guilty of any such breach of the law of nations, Henry dispatched
+      Coeuvres secretly to Brussels to carry off thence the princess. But Maria
+      de' Medici was on the alert, and frustrated the design by sending a
+      warning of what was intended to the Marquis Spinola, as a result of which
+      the Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for greater security in the
+      Archduke's own palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which he
+      continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses, Henry took the
+      wild decision that to obtain her he would invade the Low Countries as the
+      first step in the execution of that design of a war with Spain which
+      hitherto had been little more than a presence. The matter of the Duchy of
+      Cleves was a pretext ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he desired he
+      would set Europe in a blaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the new year, and
+      in the months that followed France rang with preparations. It rang, too,
+      with other things which should have given him pause. It rang with the
+      voice of preachers giving expression to the popular view; that Cleves was
+      not worth fighting for, that the war was unrighteous&mdash;a war
+      undertaken by Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against the
+      very champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring too,
+      with prophecies of the King's approaching end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin, and the
+      astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the stars that May
+      would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome&mdash;from the very pope
+      himself came notice of a conspiracy against him in which he was told that
+      the very highest in the land were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne, and Douai
+      came messages of like purport, and early in May a note was found one
+      morning on the altar of the church of Montargis announcing the King's
+      approaching death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his preparations
+      undeterred by either warnings or prognostications. There had been so many
+      conspiracies against his life already that he was become careless and
+      indifferent in such matters. Yet surely there never had been one that was
+      so abundantly heralded from every quarter, or ever one that was hatched
+      under conditions so propitious as those which he had himself created now.
+      In his soul he was not at ease, and the source of his uneasiness was the
+      coronation of the Queen, for which the preparations were now going
+      forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him from any
+      quarter it was most to be feared from those whose influence with the Queen
+      was almost such as to give them a control over her&mdash;the Concinis and
+      their unavowed but obvious ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were dead, and
+      the Queen so left that she could be made absolute regent during the
+      Dauphin's minority, it was those adventurers who would become through her
+      the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and gratify to the
+      full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that his safety lay in
+      opposing this coronation&mdash;already fixed for the 13th May&mdash;which
+      Maria de' Medici was so insistent should take place before his departure
+      for the wars. The matter so preyed upon his mind that last he unburdened
+      himself to Sully one day at the Arsenal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, my friend,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;this coronation does not please me. My heart
+      tells me that some fatality will follow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully could
+      only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained awhile in
+      deep thought. Then he started up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardieu!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I shall be murdered in this city. It is their only
+      resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation will be the cause of my
+      death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a thought, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed to the
+      prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master.&rdquo; And wrinkles deepened
+      about the bold, piercing eyes. &ldquo;It is four months and more since we
+      announced our intention of going to war, and France has resounded with our
+      preparations. We have made no secret of it. Yet in Spain not a finger has
+      been lifted in preparation to resist us, not a sword has been sharpened.
+      Upon what does Spain build? Whence her confidence that in despite of my
+      firm resolve and my abundant preparations, despite the fact announced that
+      I am to march on the last of this month, despite the fact that my troops
+      are already in Champagne with a train of artillery so complete and
+      well-furnished that France has never seen the like of it, and perhaps
+      never will again&mdash;whence the confidence that despite all this there
+      is no need to prepare defences? Upon what do they build, I say, when they
+      assume, as assume they must, that there will be no war? Resolve me that,
+      Grand Master.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain builds on my
+      death. And who are the friends of Spain here in France? Who was it
+      intrigued with Spain in such a way and to such ends as in my lifetime
+      could never have been carried to an issue? Ha! You see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!&rdquo; cried that loyal,
+      honest gentleman. &ldquo;And yet if you are convinced of it, you should break
+      off this coronation, your journey, and your war. If you wish it so, it is
+      not difficult to satisfy you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, that is it.&rdquo; He came to his feet, and gripped the duke's shoulder in
+      his strong, nervous hand. &ldquo;Break off this coronation, and never let me
+      hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can rid my mind of
+      apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop
+      the preparations and dismiss the workmen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, wait.&rdquo; The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew
+      dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. &ldquo;Oh, what to
+      decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my wife
+      take it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue
+      obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not, perhaps not,&rdquo; he answered. But his tone was not sanguine.
+      &ldquo;Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this thing.
+      But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the Queen.
+      For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and arguments
+      with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost. Maria de'
+      Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's arguments she opposed an
+      argument that was unanswerable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she
+      would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency
+      during the King's absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her, the
+      mother of the Dauphin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs
+      that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by this
+      very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced one day to
+      ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those who have the best information,&rdquo; the Nuncio answered boldly, &ldquo;are of
+      opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of Conde,
+      whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an impudently
+      defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, by God!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Yes&mdash;most certainly I want to have her
+      back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God's
+      viceregent on earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to the
+      Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than anything that had
+      yet happened in this affair, his conscience left him, despite his fears,
+      powerless now to thwart her even to the extent of removing those
+      pernicious familiars of hers of whose plottings he had all but positive
+      evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
+      magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been concerted
+      that the festivities should last four days and conclude on the Sunday with
+      the Queen's public entry into Paris. On the Monday the King was to set out
+      to take command of his armies, which were already marching upon the
+      frontiers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen&mdash;convinced by his own admission of
+      the real aim and object of the war, and driven by outraged pride to hate
+      the man who offered her this crowning insult, and determined that at all
+      costs it must be thwarted&mdash;had lent an ear to Concini's purpose to
+      avenge her, and was ready to repay infidelity with infidelity. Concini and
+      his fellow-conspirators had gone to work so confidently that a week before
+      the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege, announcing that he was
+      going with news of Henry's assassination to the Princes of Germany, whilst
+      at the same time accounts of the King's death were being published in
+      France and Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
+      outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his wife's
+      coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony by the title of
+      &ldquo;Madam Regent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience. For
+      that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and when he
+      sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him of a dream in which
+      she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring him with a tenderness such
+      as had been utterly foreign to her of late to take great care of himself
+      in the days to come. In the morning she renewed those entreaties,
+      beseeching him not to leave the Louvre that day, urging that she had a
+      premonition it would be fatal to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed for answer. &ldquo;You have heard of the predictions of La Brosse,&rdquo;
+       said he. &ldquo;Bah! You should not attach credit to such nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
+      Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to receive a like
+      answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night's broken rest,
+      Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him, he rose,
+      pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out into the
+      courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he casually asked the
+      time, observing the King's pallor and listlessness, took the liberty of
+      suggesting that his Majesty might benefit if he took the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That chance remark decided Henry's fate. His eyes quickened responsively.
+      &ldquo;You advise well,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Order my coach. I will go to the Arsenal to
+      see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await their
+      masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in a dingy,
+      clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that he had once been
+      arrested on no better grounds than because it was deemed impossible that a
+      man with such a face could be other than a villain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the Louvre, and
+      startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With fearful insistence
+      she besought him to countermand the order, and not to leave the palace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will but go there and back,&rdquo; he said, laughing at her fears. &ldquo;I shall
+      have returned before you realize that I have gone.&rdquo; And so he went, never
+      to return alive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all the
+      curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations of the city
+      against the Queen's public entry on Sunday. The Duc d'Epernon was on his
+      right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis de la Force on his left.
+      Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the right boot, whilst near the left boot,
+      opposite to Henry, sat Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He was attended
+      only by a small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some footmen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de la
+      Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block occasioned by the
+      meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the other with wine. The footmen
+      went ahead with the exception of two. Of these, one advanced to clear a
+      way for the royal vehicle, whilst the other took the opportunity to fasten
+      his garter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the shops,
+      came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on the stones
+      outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by deliberately standing
+      upon one of the spokes of the stationary wheel, he leaned over the Duc
+      d'Epernon, and, whipping a long, stout knife from his sleeve, stabbed
+      Henry in the breast. The King, who was in the act of reading a letter,
+      cried out, and threw up his arms in an instinctive warding movement,
+      thereby exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and this time the
+      blade went deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood gushed from
+      his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier riding
+      through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the stories of his death
+      already at that very hour circulating in Antwerp, Malines, Brussels, and
+      elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried by
+      Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and stood
+      there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself of the
+      incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King's gentlemen-in-waiting,
+      who had followed the coach, whipped out his sword and would have slain him
+      on the spot had he not been restrained by Epernon. The footmen seized the
+      fellow, and delivered him over to the captain of the guard. He proved to
+      be a school-master of Angouleme&mdash;which was Epernon's country. His
+      name was Ravaillac.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about, and
+      driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it was
+      announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife that had
+      stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to Henry's loyal and
+      devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge exactly whence the blow had
+      proceeded. With anger and grief in his heart he got to horse, ill as he
+      was, and, calling together his people, set out presently for the Louvre,
+      with a train one hundred strong, which was presently increased to twice
+      that number by many of the King's faithful servants who joined his company
+      as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in passing slipped a
+      note into his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a brief scrawl: &ldquo;Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done. I have
+      seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape any more than
+      he did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a gentleman
+      named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself, for this
+      strange blow will have fearful consequences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose contents
+      were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings mounting swiftly to
+      certainty, Sully rode amain towards the Louvre, his train by now amounting
+      to some three hundred horse. But at the end of the street he was stopped
+      by M. de Vitry, who drew rein as they met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, monsieur,&rdquo; Vitry greeted him, &ldquo;where are you going with such a
+      following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with more than
+      two or three attendants, which I would not advise you to do. For this plot
+      does not end here. I have seen some persons so little sensible of the loss
+      they have sustained that they cannot even simulate the grief they should
+      feel. Go back, monsieur. There is enough for you to do without going to
+      the Louvre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Persuaded by Vitry's solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart, Sully
+      faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently he was
+      overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to come at once to
+      her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as possible with him. &ldquo;This
+      proposal,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;to go alone and deliver myself into the hands of my
+      enemies, who filled the Louvre, was not calculated to allay my
+      suspicions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the guards and
+      a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the Arsenal, that others
+      had been sent to the Temple, where the powder was stored, and others again
+      to the treasurer of the Exchequer to stop all the money there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Convey to the Queen my duty and service,&rdquo; he bade the messenger, &ldquo;and
+      assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I shall continue
+      assiduously to attend the affairs of my office.&rdquo; And with that he went to
+      shut himself up in the Bastille, whither he was presently followed by a
+      stream of her Majesty's envoys, all bidding him to the Louvre. But Sully,
+      ill as he was, and now utterly prostrated by all that he had endured, put
+      himself to bed and made of his indisposition a sufficient excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her summons,
+      receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for any apprehensions.
+      Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain security in the esteem in
+      which the Parisians held him. An attempt against him in the Louvre itself
+      would prove that the blow that had killed his master was not the
+      independent act of a fanatic, as it was being represented; and vengeance
+      would follow swiftly upon the heads of those who would thus betray
+      themselves of having made of that poor wretch's fanaticism an instrument
+      to their evil ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that assurance he went, and he has left on record the burning
+      indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction, complacency, and
+      even mirth that he discovered in that house of death. The Queen herself,
+      however, overwrought by the events, and perhaps conscience-stricken by the
+      tragedy which in the eleventh hour she had sought to avert, burst into
+      tears at sight of Sully, and brought in the Dauphin, who flung himself
+      upon the Duke's neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My son,&rdquo; the Queen addressed him, &ldquo;this is Monsieur de Sully. You must
+      love him well, for he was one of the best and most faithful servants of
+      the King your father, and I entreat him to continue to serve you in the
+      same manner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his
+      suspicions were unworthy. But, even then, the sequel would very quickly
+      have undeceived him. For very soon thereafter his fall was brought about
+      by the Concinis and their creatures, so that no obstacle should remain
+      between themselves and the full gratification of their fell ambitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At once he saw the whole policy of the dead King subversed; he saw the
+      renouncing of all ancient alliances, and the union of the crowns of France
+      and Spain; the repealing of all acts of pacification; the destruction of
+      the Protestants; the dissipation of the treasures amassed by Henry; the
+      disgrace of those who would not receive the yoke of the new favourites.
+      All this Sully witnessed in his declining years, and he witnessed, too,
+      the rapid rise to the greatest power and dignity in the State of that
+      Florentine adventurer, Concino Concini&mdash;now bearing the title of
+      Marshal d'Ancre&mdash;who had so cunningly known how to profit by a
+      Queen's jealousy and a King's indiscretions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the miserable Ravaillac, it is pretended that he maintained under
+      torture and to the very hour of his death that he had no accomplices, that
+      what he had done he had done to prevent an unrighteous war against
+      Catholicism and the Pope&mdash;which was, no doubt, the falsehood with
+      which those who used him played upon his fanaticism and whetted him to
+      their service. I say &ldquo;pretended&rdquo; because, after all, complete records of
+      his examinations are not discoverable, and there is a story that when at
+      the point of death, seeing himself abandoned by those in whom perhaps he
+      had trusted, he signified a desire to confess, and did so confess; but the
+      notary Voisin, who took his depositions in articulo mortis, set them down
+      in a hand so slovenly as to be afterwards undecipherable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That may or may not be true. But the statement that when the President du
+      Harlay sought to pursue inquiries into certain allegations by a woman
+      named d'Escoman, which incriminated the Duc d'Epernon, he received a royal
+      order to desist, rests upon sound authority.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      That is the story of the assassination of Henry IV. re-told in the light
+      of certain records which appear to me to have been insufficiently studied.
+      They should suggest a train of speculation leading to inferences which,
+      whilst obvious, I hesitate to define absolutely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it be asked,&rdquo; says Perefixe, &ldquo;who were the friends that suggested to
+      Ravaillac so damnable a design, history replies that it is ignorant and
+      that upon an action of such consequences it is not permissible to give
+      suspicions and conjectures for certain truths. The judges themselves who
+      interrogated him dared not open their mouths, and never mentioned the
+      matter but with gestures of horror and amazement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Murder of Amy Robsart
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There had been a banquet, followed by a masque, and this again by a dance
+      in which the young queen had paired off with Lord Robert Dudley, who in
+      repute was the handsomest man in Europe, just as in fact he was the
+      vainest, shallowest, and most unscrupulous. There had been homage and
+      flattery lavishly expressed, and there was a hint of masked hostility from
+      certain quarters to spice the adventure, and to thrill her bold young
+      spirit. Never yet in all the months of her reign since her coronation in
+      January of last year had she felt so much a queen, and so conscious of the
+      power of her high estate; never so much a woman, and so conscious of the
+      weakness of her sex. The interaction of those conflicting senses wrought
+      upon her like a heady wine. She leaned more heavily upon the silken arm of
+      her handsome Master of the Horse, and careless in her intoxication of what
+      might be thought or said, she&mdash;who by the intimate favour shown him
+      had already loosed the tongue of Scandal and set it chattering in every
+      court in Europe&mdash;drew him forth from that thronged and glittering
+      chamber of the Palace of Whitehall into the outer solitude and friendly
+      gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he, nothing loth to obey the suasion of that white hand upon his arm,
+      exultant, indeed, to parade before them all the power he had with her,
+      went willingly enough. Let Norfolk and Sussex scowl, let Arundel bite his
+      lip until it bled, and sober Cecil stare cold disapproval. They should
+      mend their countenances soon, and weigh their words or be for ever
+      silenced, when he was master in England. And that he would soon be master
+      he was assured to-night by every glance of her blue eyes, by the pressure
+      of that fair hand upon his arm, by the languishing abandonment with which
+      that warm young body swayed towards him, as they passed out from the blaze
+      of lights and the strains of music into the gloom and silence of the
+      gallery leading to the terrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out&mdash;let us go out, Robin. Let me have air,&rdquo; she almost panted, as
+      she drew him on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Assuredly he would be master soon. Indeed, he might have been master
+      already but for that wife of his, that stumbling-block to his ambition,
+      who practiced the housewifely virtues at Cumnor Place, and clung so
+      tenaciously and so inconsiderately to life in spite of all his plans to
+      relieve her of the burden of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a year and more his name had been coupled with the Queen's in a tale
+      that hurt her honour as a woman and imperilled her dignity as a sovereign.
+      Already in October of 1559 Alvarez de Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, had
+      written home: &ldquo;I have learnt certain things as to the terms on which the
+      Queen and Lord Robert stand towards each other which I could not have
+      believed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was at a time when de Quadra was one of a dozen ambassadors who were
+      competing for her hand, and Lord Robert had, himself, appeared to be an
+      ally of de Quadra and an advocate of the Spanish marriage with the
+      Archduke Charles. But it was a presence which nowise deceived the astute
+      Spaniard, who employed a legion of spies to keep him well informed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the dallying with us,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;all the dallying with the Swede,
+      all the dallying there will be with the rest, one after another, is merely
+      to keep Lord Robert's enemies in play until his villainy about his wife
+      can be executed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What that particular villainy was, the ambassador had already stated
+      earlier in his letter. &ldquo;I have learnt from a person who usually gives me
+      true information that Lord Robert has sent to have his wife poisoned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What had actually happened was that Sir Richard Verney&mdash;a trusted
+      retainer of Lord Robert's&mdash;had reported to Dr. Bayley, of New
+      College, Oxford, that Lady Robert Dudley was &ldquo;sad and ailing,&rdquo; and had
+      asked him for a potion. But the doctor was learned in more matters than
+      physic. He had caught an echo of the tale of Lord Robert's ambition; he
+      had heard a whisper that whatever suitors might come from overseas for
+      Elizabeth, she would marry none but &ldquo;my lord&rdquo;&mdash;as Lord Robert was now
+      commonly styled. More, he had aforetime heard rumours of the
+      indispositions of Lady Robert, yet had never found those rumours verified
+      by the fact. Some months ago, it had been reported that her ladyship was
+      suffering from cancer of the breast and likely soon to die of it. Yet Dr.
+      Bayley had reason to know that a healthier woman did not live in
+      Berkshire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good doctor was a capable deductive reasoner, and the conclusion to
+      which he came was that if they poisoned her under cover of his potion&mdash;she
+      standing in no need of physic&mdash;he might afterwards be hanged as a
+      cover for their crime. So he refused to prescribe as he was invited, nor
+      troubled to make a secret of invitation and refusal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For awhile, then, Lord Robert had prudently held his hand; moreover, the
+      urgency there had been a year ago, when that host of foreign suitors laid
+      siege to Elizabeth of England, had passed, and his lordship could afford
+      to wait. But now of a sudden the urgency was returned. Under the pressure
+      brought to bear upon her to choose a husband, Elizabeth had half-committed
+      herself to marry the Archduke Charles, promising the Spanish ambassador a
+      definite answer within a few days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Robert had felt the earth to be quaking under him; he had seen the
+      ruin of his high ambitions; he had watched with rage the expanding mockery
+      upon the countenances of Norfolk, Sussex, and those others who hated and
+      despised him; and he had cursed that wife of his who knew not when to die.
+      But for that obstinacy with which she clung to life he had been the
+      Queen's husband these many months, so making an end to suspense and to the
+      danger that lies in delay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To-night the wantonness with which the Queen flaunted before the eyes of
+      all her court the predilection in which she held him, came not merely to
+      lull his recent doubts and fears, to feed his egregious vanity, and to
+      assure him that in her heart he need fear no rival; it came also to set
+      his soul Quiver impotent rage. He had but to put forth his hands to
+      possess himself of this splendid prize. Yet those hands of his were bound
+      while that woman lived at Cumnor. Conceive his feelings as they stole away
+      together like any pair of lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arm in arm they came by a stone gallery, where a stalwart scarlet
+      sentinel, a yeoman of the guard, with a Tudor rose embroidered in gold
+      upon his back, stood under a lamp set in the wall, with grounded pike and
+      body stiffly erect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tall young Queen was in crimson satin with cunningly-wrought silver
+      embroideries, trimmed with tufted silver fringe, her stomacher stiff with
+      silver bullion studded with gold rosettes and Roman pearls, her bodice cut
+      low to display her splendid neck, decked by a carcanet of pearls and
+      rubies, and surmounted by a fan-like cuff of guipure, high behind and
+      sloping towards the bust. Thus she appeared to the sentinel as the rays of
+      the single lamp behind him struck fire from her red-gold hair. As if by
+      her very gait to express the wantonness of her mood, she pointed her toes
+      and walked with head thrown back, smiling up into the gipsy face of her
+      companion, who was arrayed from head to foot in shimmering ivory satin,
+      with an elegance no man in England could have matched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They came by that stone gallery to a little terrace above the Privy Steps.
+      A crescent moon hung low over the Lambeth marshes across the river. From a
+      barge that floated gay with lights in mid-stream came a tinkle of lutes,
+      and the sweet voice of a singing boy. A moment the lovers stood at gaze,
+      entranced by the beauty of the soft, tepid September night, so subtly
+      adapted to their mood. Then she fetched a sigh, and hung more heavily upon
+      his arm, leaned nearer to his tall, vigorous, graceful figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin, Robin!&rdquo; was all she said, but in her voice throbbed a world of
+      passionate longing, an exquisite blend of delight and pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Judging the season ripe, his arm flashed round her, and drew her fiercely
+      close. For a moment she was content to yield, her head against his
+      stalwart shoulder, a very woman nestling to the mate of her choice,
+      surrendering to her master. Then the queen in her awoke and strangled
+      nature. Roughly she disengaged herself from his arm, and stood away, her
+      breathing quickened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God's Death, Robin!&rdquo; There was a harsh note in the voice that lately had
+      cooed so softly. &ldquo;You are strangely free, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he, impudence incarnate, nothing abashed, accustomed to her gusty
+      moods, to her alternations between the two natures she had inherited&mdash;from
+      overbearing father and wanton mother&mdash;was determined at all costs to
+      take the fullest advantage of the hour, to make an end of suspense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not free, but enslaved&mdash;by love and worship of you. Would you
+      deny me; Would you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I, but fate,&rdquo; she answered heavily, and he knew that the woman at
+      Cumnor was in her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fate will soon mend the wrong that fate has done&mdash;very soon now.&rdquo; He
+      took her hand, and, melted again from her dignity, she let it lie in his.
+      &ldquo;When that is done, sweet, then will I claim you for my own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When that is done, Robin?&rdquo; she questioned almost fearfully, as if a
+      sudden dread suspicion broke upon her mind. &ldquo;When what is done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment to choose his words, what time she stared intently into
+      the face that gleamed white in the surrounding gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When that poor ailing spirit is at rest.&rdquo; And he added: &ldquo;It will be
+      soon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou hast said the same aforetime, Robin. Yet it has not so fallen out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has clung to life beyond what could have been believed of her
+      condition,&rdquo; he explained, unconscious of any sinister ambiguity. &ldquo;But the
+      end, I know, is very near&mdash;a matter but of days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of days!&rdquo; she shivered, and moved forward to the edge of the terrace, he
+      keeping step beside her. Then she stood awhile in silence, looking down at
+      the dark oily surge of water. &ldquo;You loved her once, Robin?&rdquo; she asked, in a
+      queer, unnatural voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never loved but once,&rdquo; answered that perfect courtier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet you married her&mdash;men say it was a love marriage. It was a
+      marriage, anyway, and you can speak so calmly of her death?&rdquo; Her tone was
+      brooding. She sought understanding that should silence her own lingering
+      doubt of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where lies the blame? Who made me what I am?&rdquo; Again his bold arm
+      encompassed her. Side by side they peered down through the gloom at the
+      rushing waters, and he seized an image from them. &ldquo;Our love is like that
+      seething tide,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;To resist it is to labour in agony awhile, and
+      then to perish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to yield is to be swept away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To happiness,&rdquo; he cried, and reverted to his earlier prayer. &ldquo;Say that
+      when... that afterwards, I may claim you for my own. Be true to yourself,
+      obey the voice of instinct, and so win to happiness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him, seeking to scan the handsome face in that dim light
+      that baffled her, and he observed the tumultuous heave of her white
+      breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I trust thee, Robin? Can I trust thee? Answer me true!&rdquo; she implored
+      him, adorably weak, entirely woman now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does your own heart answer you?&rdquo; quoth he, loaning close above her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I can, Robin. And, anyway, I must. I cannot help myself. I am but
+      a woman, after all,&rdquo; she murmured, and sighed. &ldquo;Be it as thou wilt. Come
+      to me again when thou art free.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent lower, murmuring incoherently, and she put up a hand to pat his
+      swarthy bearded cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall make thee greater than any man in England, so thou make me
+      happier than any woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught the hand in his and kissed it passionately, his soul singing a
+      triumph song within him. Norfolk and Sussex and those other scowling ones
+      should soon be whistled to the master's heel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As they turned arm in arm into the gallery to retrace their steps, they
+      came suddenly face to face with a slim, sleek gentleman, who bowed
+      profoundly, a smile upon his crafty, shaven, priestly face. In a smooth
+      voice and an accent markedly foreign, he explained that he, too, sought
+      the cool of the terrace, not thinking to intrude; and upon that, bowing
+      again, he passed on and effaced himself. It was Alvarez de Quadra, Bishop
+      of Aquila, the argus-eyed ambassador of Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young face of the Queen hardened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would I were as well served abroad as the King of Spain is here,&rdquo; she
+      said aloud, that the retreating ambassador might hear the dubious
+      compliment; and for my lord's ear alone she added under her breath: &ldquo;The
+      spy! Philip of Spain will hear of this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So that he hears something more, what shall it signify?&rdquo; quoth my lord,
+      and laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They paced the length of the gallery in silence, past the yeoman of the
+      guard, who kept his watch, and into the first antechamber. Perhaps it was
+      that meeting with de Quadra and my lord's answer to her comment that
+      prompted what now she asked: &ldquo;What is it ails her, Robin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A wasting sickness,&rdquo; he answered, never doubting to whom the question
+      alluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said, I think, that... that the end is very near.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught her meaning instantly. &ldquo;Indeed, if she is not dead already, she
+      is very nearly so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lied, for never had Amy Dudley been in better health. And yet he spoke
+      the truth, for in so much as her life depended upon his will, it was as
+      good as spent. This was, he knew, a decisive moment of his career. The
+      hour was big with fate. If now he were weak or hesitant, the chance might
+      slip away and be for ever lost to him. Elizabeth's moods were as uncertain
+      as were certain the hostile activities of my lord's enemies. He must
+      strike quickly whilst she was in her present frame of mind, and bring her
+      to wedlock, be it in public or in private. But first he must shake off the
+      paralysing encumbrance of that house-wife down at Cumnor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe&mdash;from evidence that I account abundant&mdash;that he
+      considered it with the cold remorselessness of the monstrous egotist he
+      was. An upstart, great-grandson to a carpenter, noble only in two
+      descents, and in both of them stained by the block, he found a queen&mdash;the
+      victim of a physical passion that took no account of the worthlessness
+      underlying his splendid exterior&mdash;reaching out a hand to raise him to
+      a throne. Being what he was, he weighed his young wife's life at naught in
+      the evil scales of his ambition. And yet he had loved her once, more truly
+      perhaps than he could now pretend to love the Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was some ten years since, as a lad of eighteen, he had taken Sir John
+      Robsart's nineteen-year-old daughter to wife. She had brought him
+      considerable wealth and still more devotion. Because of this devotion she
+      was content to spend her days at Cumnor, whilst he ruffled it at court;
+      content to take such crumbs of attention as he could spare her upon
+      occasion. And during the past year, whilst he had been plotting her death,
+      she had been diligently caring for his interests and fostering the
+      prosperity of the Berkshire estate. If he thought of this at all, he
+      allowed no weakly sentiment to turn him from his purpose. There was too
+      much at stake for that&mdash;a throne, no less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, on the morning after that half-surrender of Elizabeth's, we find
+      my lord closeted with his henchman, Sir Richard Verney. Sir Richard&mdash;like
+      his master&mdash;was a greedy, unscrupulous, ambitious scoundrel, prepared
+      to go to any lengths for the sake of such worldly advancement as it lay in
+      my lord's power to give him. My lord perforce used perfect frankness with
+      this perfect servant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thou'lt rise or fall with me, Dick,&rdquo; quoth he. &ldquo;Help me up, then, and so
+      mount with me. When I am King, as soon now I shall be, look to me. Now to
+      the thing that is to do. Thou'lt have guessed it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To Sir Richard it was an easy guess, considering how much already he had
+      been about this business. He signified as much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My lord shifted in his elbow-chair, and drew his embroidered bedgown of
+      yellow satin closer about his shapely limbs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hast failed me twice before, Richard,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;God's death, man, fail
+      me not again, or the last chance may go the way of the others. There's a
+      magic in the number three. See that I profit by it, or I am undone, and
+      thou with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd not have failed before, but for that suspicious dotard Bayley,&rdquo;
+       grumbled Verney. &ldquo;Your lordship bade me see that all was covered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, aye. And I bid thee so again. On thy life, leave no footprints by
+      which we may be tracked. Bayley is not the only physician in Oxford. About
+      it, then, and swiftly. Time is the very soul of fortune in this business,
+      with the Spaniard straining at the leash, and Cecil and the rest pleading
+      his case with her. Succeed, and thy fortune's made; fail, and trouble not
+      to seek me again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard bowed, and took his leave. As he reached the door, his
+      lordship stayed him. &ldquo;If thou bungle, do not look to me. The court goes to
+      Windsor to-morrow. Bring me word there within the week.&rdquo; He rose,
+      magnificently tall and stately, in his bedgown of embroidered yellow
+      satin, his handsome head thrown back, and went after his retainer.
+      &ldquo;Thou'lt not fail me, Dick,&rdquo; said he, a hand upon the lesser scoundrel's
+      shoulder. &ldquo;There is much at issue for me, and for thee with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not fail you, my lord,&rdquo; Sir Richard rashly promised, and on that
+      they parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard did not mean to fail. He knew the importance of succeeding,
+      and he appreciated the urgency of the business as much as did my lord
+      himself. But between his cold, remorseless will to succeed and success
+      itself there lay a gulf which it needed all his resource to bridge. He
+      paid a short visit to Lady Robert at Cumnor, and professed deepest concern
+      to find in her a pallor and an ailing air which no one else had yet
+      observed. He expressed himself on the subject to Mrs. Buttelar and the
+      other members of her ladyship's household, reproaching them with their
+      lack of care of their mistress. Mrs. Buttelar became indignant under his
+      reproaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, now, Sir Richard, do you wonder that my lady is sad and downcast
+      with such tales as are going of my lord's doings at court, and of what
+      there is 'twixt the Queen and him? Her ladyship may be too proud to
+      complain, but she suffers the more for that, poor lamb. There was talk of
+      a divorce awhile ago that got to her ears.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old wives' tales,&rdquo; snorted Sir Richard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Likely,&rdquo; agreed Mrs. Buttelar. &ldquo;Yet when my lord neither comes to Cumnor,
+      nor requires her ladyship to go to him, what is she to think, poor soul?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard made light of all, and went off to Oxford to find a physician
+      more accommodating than Dr. Bayley. But Dr. Bayley had talked too much,
+      and it was in vain that Sir Richard pleaded with each of the two
+      physicians he sought that her ladyship was ailing&mdash;&ldquo;sad and heavy&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      that he must have a potion for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each in turn shook his head. They had no medicine for sorrow, was their
+      discreet answer. From his description of her condition, said each, it was
+      plain that her ladyship's sickness was of the mind, and, considering the
+      tales that were afloat, neither was surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard went back to his Oxford lodging with the feeling of a man
+      checkmated. For two whole days of that precious time he lay there
+      considering what to do. He thought of going to seek a physician in
+      Abingdon. But fearing no better success in that quarter, fearing, indeed,
+      that in view of the rumours abroad he would merely be multiplying what my
+      lord called &ldquo;footprints,&rdquo; he decided to take some other way to his
+      master's ends. He was a resourceful, inventive scoundrel, and soon he had
+      devised a plan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Friday he wrote from Oxford to Lady Robert, stating that he had a
+      communication for her on the subject of his lordship as secret as it was
+      urgent. That he desired to come to her at Cumnor again, but dared not do
+      so openly. He would come if she would contrive that her servants should be
+      absent, and he exhorted her to let no one of them know that he was coming,
+      else he might be ruined, out of his desire to serve her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That letter he dispatched by the hand of his servant Nunweek, desiring him
+      to bring an answer. It was a communication that had upon her ladyship's
+      troubled mind precisely the effect that the rascal conceived. There was
+      about Sir Richard's personality nothing that could suggest the villain. He
+      was a smiling, blue-eyed, florid gentleman, of a kindly manner that led
+      folk to trust him. And on the occasion of his late visit to Cumnor he had
+      displayed such tender solicitude that her ladyship&mdash;starved of
+      affection as she was&mdash;had been deeply touched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His letter so cunningly couched filled her with vague alarm and with
+      anxiety. She had heard so many and such afflicting rumours, and had
+      received in my lord's cruel neglect of her such circumstantial
+      confirmation of them, that she fastened avidly upon what she deemed the
+      chance of learning at last the truth. Sir Richard Verney had my lord's
+      confidence, and was much about the court in his attendance upon my lord.
+      He would know the truth, and what could this letter mean but that he was
+      disposed to tell it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she sent him back a line in answer, bidding him come on Sunday
+      afternoon. She would contrive to be alone in the house, so that he need
+      not fear being seen by any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As she promised, so she performed, and on the Sunday packed off her
+      household to the fair that was being held at Abingdon that day, using
+      insistence with the reluctant, and particularly with one of her women, a
+      Mrs. Oddingsell, who expressed herself strongly against leaving her
+      ladyship alone in that lonely house. At length, however, the last of them
+      was got off, and my lady was left impatiently to await her secret visitor.
+      It was late afternoon when he arrived, accompanied by Nunweek, whom he
+      left to hold the horses under the chestnuts in the avenue. Himself he
+      reached the house across the garden, where the blighting hand of autumn
+      was already at work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the porch he found her waiting, fretted by her impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very good in you to have come, Sir Richard,&rdquo; was her gracious
+      greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am your ladyship's devoted servant,&rdquo; was his sufficient answer, and he
+      doffed his plumed bonnet, and bowed low before her. &ldquo;We shall be private
+      in your bower above stairs,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, we are private anywhere. I am all alone, as you desired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is very wise&mdash;most wise,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Will your ladyship lead the
+      way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So they went up that steep, spiral staircase, which had loomed so
+      prominently in the plans the ingenious scoundrel had evolved. Across the
+      gallery on the first floor they entered a little room whose windows
+      overlooked the garden. This was her bower&mdash;an intimate cosy room,
+      reflecting on every hand the gentle, industrious personality of the owner.
+      On an oak table near the window were spread some papers and account-books
+      concerned with the estate&mdash;with which she had sought to beguile the
+      time of waiting. She led the way towards this, and, sinking into the
+      high-backed chair that stood before it, she looked up at him expectantly.
+      She was pale, there were dark stains under her eyes, and wistful lines had
+      crept into the sweet face of that neglected wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Contemplating his poor victim now, Sir Richard may have compared her with
+      the woman by whom my lord desired so impatiently to supplant her. She was
+      tall and beautifully shaped, despite an almost maidenly slenderness. Her
+      countenance was gentle and adorable, with its soft grey eyes and light
+      brown hair, and tender, wistful mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently desired
+      her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of her. Then he
+      obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed the remorseless spur
+      of ambition. In reality, then as now, his beacon-light was love of self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious impatience to
+      hear the news of her lord which he had promised her, Sir Richard may have
+      felt some pang of pity. But, like my lord, he was of those whose love of
+      self suffers the rivalry of no weak emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your news, Sir Richard,&rdquo; she besought him, her dove-like glance upon his
+      florid face&mdash;less florid now than was its wont.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned against the table, his back to the window. &ldquo;Why, it is briefly
+      this,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;My lord...&rdquo; And then he checked, and fell into a
+      listening attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. What is it?&rdquo; Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting under so
+      much mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sh! Stay you here,&rdquo; he enjoined. &ldquo;If we are spied upon...&rdquo; He left the
+      sentence there. Already he was moving quickly, stealthily, towards the
+      door. He paused before opening it. &ldquo;Stay where you are, my lady,&rdquo; he
+      enjoined again, so gravely that she could have no thought of disobeying
+      him. &ldquo;I will return at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There he
+      stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of whipcord, attached
+      at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle sharpness. That bodkin he drove into
+      the edge of one of the panels of the wainscot, in line with the topmost
+      step; drawing the cord taut at a height of a foot or so above this step,
+      he made fast its other end to the newel-post at the stair-head. He had so
+      rehearsed the thing in his mind that the performance of it occupied but a
+      few seconds. Such dim light of that autumn afternoon as reached the spot
+      would leave that fine cord invisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his absence,
+      so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to resolve upon
+      disobeying his injunction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We move in secret like conspirators,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and so we are easily
+      affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my lord himself...
+      here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord!&rdquo; she interrupted, coming excitedly to her feet. &ldquo;Lord Robert?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure, my lady. It was he had need to visit you in secret&mdash;for
+      did the Queen have knowledge of his coming here, it would mean the Tower
+      for him. You cannot think what, out of love for you, his lordship suffers.
+      The Queen...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you say that he is here, man,&rdquo; her voice shrilled up in
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is below, my lady. Such is his peril that he dared not set foot in
+      Cumnor until he was certain beyond doubt that you are here alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is below!&rdquo; she cried, and a flush dyed her pale cheeks, a light of
+      gladness quickened her sad eyes. Already she had gathered from his cunning
+      words a new and comforting explanation of the things reported to her. &ldquo;He
+      is below!&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; She turned from him, and in an instant was
+      speeding towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood rooted there, his nether lip between his teeth, his face a
+      ghastly white, whilst she ran on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord! Robin! Robin!&rdquo; he heard her calling, as she crossed the
+      corridor. Then came a piercing scream that echoed through the silent
+      house; a pause; a crashing thud below; and&mdash;silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard remained by the table, immovable. Blood was trickling down his
+      chin. He had sunk his teeth through his lip when that scream rang out. A
+      long moment thus, as if entranced, awe-stricken. Then he braced himself,
+      and went forward, reeling at first like a drunken man. But by the time he
+      had reached the stairs he was master of himself again. Swiftly, for all
+      his trembling fingers, he unfastened the cord's end from the newel-post.
+      The wrench upon it had already pulled the bodkin from the wainscot. He
+      went down that abrupt spiral staircase at a moderate pace, mechanically
+      coiling the length of whip-cord, and bestowing it with the bodkin in his
+      pouch again, and all the while his eyes were fixed upon the grey bundle
+      that lay so still at the stairs' foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to it at last, and, pausing, looked more closely. He was thankful
+      that there was not the need to touch it. The position of the brown-haired
+      head was such as to leave no doubt of the complete success of his design.
+      Her neck was broken. Lord Robert Dudley was free to marry the Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deliberately Sir Richard stepped over the huddled body of that poor victim
+      of a knave's ambition, crossed the hall, and passed out, closing the door.
+      An excellent day's work, thought he, most excellently accomplished. The
+      servants, returning from Abingdon Fair on that Sunday evening, would find
+      her there. They would publish the fact that in their absence her ladyship
+      had fallen downstairs and broken her neck, and that was the end of the
+      matter.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      But that was not the end at all. Fate, the ironic interloper, had taken a
+      hand in this evil game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The court had moved a few days earlier to Windsor, and thither on the
+      Friday&mdash;the 6th of September&mdash;came Alvarez de Quadra to seek the
+      definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the subject of the
+      Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at Whitehall, coupled with
+      his mistrust of her promises and experience of her fickleness, had
+      rendered him uneasy. Either she was trifling with him, or else she was
+      behaving in a manner utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke.
+      In either case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must know where
+      he stood. Having failed to obtain an audience before the court left
+      London, he had followed it to Windsor, cursing all women and contemplating
+      the advantages of the Salic law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found at Windsor an atmosphere of constraint, and it was not until the
+      morrow that he obtained an audience with the Queen. Even then this was due
+      to chance rather than to design on the part of Elizabeth. For they met on
+      the terrace as she was returning from hunting. She dismissed those about
+      her, including the stalwart Robert Dudley, and, alone with de Quadra,
+      invited him to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am writing to my master, and I desire to know
+      whether your Majesty would wish me to add anything to what you have
+      announced already as your intention regarding the Archduke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She knit her brows. The wily Spaniard fenced so closely that there was no
+      alternative but to come to grips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, sir,&rdquo; she answered dryly, &ldquo;you may tell his Majesty that I have come
+      to an absolute decision, which is that I will not marry the Archduke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colour mounted to the Spaniard's sallow cheeks. Iron self-control
+      alone saved him from uttering unpardonable words. Even so he spoke
+      sternly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This, madame, is not what you had led me to believe when last we talked
+      upon the subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At another time Elizabeth might have turned upon him and rent him for that
+      speech. But it happened that she was in high good-humour that afternoon,
+      and disposed to indulgence. She laughed, surveying herself in the small
+      steel mirror that dangled from her waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are ungallant to remind me, my lord,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;My sex, you may have
+      heard, is privileged to change of mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, madame, I pray that you may change it yet again.&rdquo; His tone was
+      bitter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your prayer will not be heard. This time I am resolved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      De Quadra bowed. &ldquo;The King, my master, will not be pleased, I fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked him straightly in the face, her dark eyes kindling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God's death!&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;I marry to please myself, and not the King your
+      master.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are resolved on marriage then?&rdquo; flashed he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it please you,&rdquo; she mocked him archly, her mood of joyousness already
+      conquering her momentary indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What pleases you must please me also, madame,&rdquo; he answered, in a tone so
+      cold that it belied his words. &ldquo;That it please you, is reason enough why
+      you should marry... Whom did your Majesty say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay. I named no names. Yet one so astute might hazard a shrewd guess.&rdquo;
+       Half-challenging, half-coy, she eyed him over her fan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A guess? Nay, madame. I might affront your Majesty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were deluded by appearances. If I named a subject who signally
+      enjoys your royal favour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean Lord Robert Dudley.&rdquo; She paled a little, and her bosom's heave
+      was quickened. &ldquo;Why should the guess affront me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because a queen&mdash;a wise queen, madame&mdash;does not mate with a
+      subject&mdash;particularly with one who has a wife already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had stung her. He had wounded at once the pride of the woman and the
+      dignity of the queen, yet in a way that made it difficult for her to take
+      direct offense. She bit her lip and mastered her surge of anger. Then she
+      laughed, a thought sneeringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, as to my Lord Robert's wife, it seems you are less well-informed
+      than usual, sir. Lady Robert Dudley is dead, or very nearly so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as blank amazement overspread his face, she passed upon her way and
+      left him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But anon, considering, she grew vaguely uneasy, and that very night
+      expressed her afflicting doubt to my lord, reporting to him de Quadra's
+      words. His lordship, who was mentally near-sighted, laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll change his tone before long,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She set her hands upon his shoulders, and looked up adoringly into his
+      handsome gipsy face. Never had he known her so fond as in these last days
+      since her surrender to him that night upon the terrace at Whitehall, never
+      had she been more the woman and less the queen in her bearing towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are sure, Robin? You are quite sure?&rdquo; she pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew her close, she yielding herself to his embrace. &ldquo;With so much at
+      stake could I be less than sure, sweet?&rdquo; said he, and so convinced her&mdash;the
+      more easily since he afforded her the conviction she desired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was on the night of Saturday, and early on Monday came the news which
+      justified him of his assurances. It was brought him to Windsor by one of
+      Amy's Cumnor servants, a fellow named Bowes, who, with the others, had
+      been away at Abingdon Fair yesterday afternoon, and had returned to find
+      his mistress dead at the stairs' foot&mdash;the result of an accident, as
+      all believed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not quite the news that my lord had been expecting. It staggered
+      him a little that an accident so very opportune should have come to
+      resolve his difficulties, obviating the need for recourse to those more
+      dangerous measures with which he had charged Sir Richard Verney. He
+      perceived how suspicion might now fall upon himself, how his enemies would
+      direct it, and on the instant made provision. There and then he seized a
+      pen, and wrote to his kinsman, Sir Thomas Blount, who even then was on his
+      way to Cumnor. He stated in the letter what he had learnt from Bowes, bade
+      Blount engage the coroner to make the strictest investigation, and send
+      for Amy's natural brother, Appleyard. &ldquo;Have no respect to any living
+      person,&rdquo; was the final injunction of that letter which he sent Blount by
+      the hand of Bowes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, then, before he could carry to the Queen the news of this accident
+      which had broken his matrimonial shackles, Sir Richard Verney arrived with
+      the true account. He had expected praise and thanks from his master.
+      Instead, he met first dismay, and then anger and fierce reproaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My lord, this is unjust,&rdquo; the faithful retainer protested. &ldquo;Knowing the
+      urgency, I took the only way&mdash;contrived the accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray God,&rdquo; said Dudley, &ldquo;that the jury find it to have been an accident;
+      for if the truth should come to be discovered, I leave you to the
+      consequences. I warned you of that before you engaged in this. Look for no
+      help from me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I look for none,&rdquo; said Sir Richard, stung to hot contempt by the meanness
+      and cowardice so characteristic of the miserable egotist he served. &ldquo;Nor
+      will there be the need, for I have left no footprints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope that may be so, for I tell you, man, that I have ordered a strict
+      inquiry, bidding them have no respect to any living person, and to that I
+      shall adhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if, in spite of that, I am not hanged?&rdquo; quoth Sir Richard, a sneer
+      upon his white face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come to me again when the affair is closed, and we will talk of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Richard went out, rage and disgust in his heart, leaving my lord with
+      rage and fear in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Grown calmer now, my lord dressed himself with care and sought the Queen
+      to tell her of the accident that had removed the obstacle to their
+      marriage. And that same night her Majesty coldly informed de Quadra that
+      Lady Robert Dudley had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Spaniard received the information with a countenance that was
+      inscrutable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Majesty's gift of prophecy is not so widely known as it deserves to
+      be,&rdquo; was his cryptic comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at him blankly a moment. Then a sudden uneasy memory awakened
+      by his words, she drew him forward to a window embrasure apart from those
+      who had stood about her, and for greater security addressed him, as he
+      tells us, in Italian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not think I understand you, sir. Will you be plain with me?&rdquo; She
+      stood erect and stiff, and frowned upon him after the manner of her
+      bullying father. But de Quadra held the trumps, and was not easily
+      intimidated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About the prophecy?&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Why, did not your Majesty foretell the
+      poor lady's death a full day before it came to pass? Did you not say that
+      she was already dead, or nearly so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw her blench; saw fear stare from those dark eyes that could be so
+      very bold. Then her ever-ready anger followed swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Sblood, man! What do you imply?&rdquo; she cried, and went on without waiting
+      for his answer. &ldquo;The poor woman was sick and ill, and must soon have
+      succumbed; it will no doubt be found that the accident which anticipated
+      nature was due to her condition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gently he shook his head, relishing her discomfiture, taking satisfaction
+      in torturing her who had flouted him and his master, in punishing her whom
+      he had every reason to believe guilty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Majesty, I fear, has been ill-informed on that score. The poor lady
+      was in excellent health&mdash;and like to have lived for many years&mdash;at
+      least, so I gather from Sir William Cecil, whose information is usually
+      exact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She clutched his arm. &ldquo;You told him what I had said?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was indiscreet, perhaps. Yet, how was I to know...?&rdquo; He left his
+      sentence there. &ldquo;I but expressed my chagrin at your decision on the score
+      of the Archduke&mdash;hardly a wise decision, if I may be so bold,&rdquo; he
+      added slyly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught the suggestion of a bargain, and became instantly suspicious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You transcend the duties of your office, my lord,&rdquo; she rebuked him, and
+      turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But soon that night she was closeted with Dudley, and closely questioning
+      him about the affair. My lord was mightily vehement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I take Heaven to be my witness,&rdquo; quoth he, when she all but taxed him
+      with having procured his lady's death, &ldquo;that I am innocent of any part in
+      it. My injunctions to Blount, who has gone to Cumnor, are that the matter
+      be sifted without respect to any person, and if it can be shown that this
+      is other than the accident I deem it, the murderer shall hang.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flung her arms about his neck, and laid her head on his shoulder. &ldquo;Oh,
+      Robin, Robin, I am full of fears,&rdquo; she wailed, and was nearer to tears
+      than he had ever seen her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, anon, as the days passed their fears diminished, and finally the jury
+      at Cumnor&mdash;delayed in their finding, and spurred by my lord to
+      exhaustive inquiries&mdash;returned a verdict of &ldquo;found dead,&rdquo; which in
+      all the circumstances left his lordship&mdash;who was known, moreover, to
+      have been at Windsor when his lady died&mdash;fully acquitted. Both he and
+      the Queen took courage from that finding, and made no secret of it now
+      that they would very soon be wed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there were many whom that finding did not convince, who read my lord
+      too well, and would never suffer him to reap the fruits of his evil deed.
+      Prominent among these were Arundel&mdash;who himself had aimed at the
+      Queen's hand&mdash;Norfolk and Pembroke, and behind them was a great mass
+      of the people. Indignation against Lord Robert was blazing out, fanned by
+      such screaming preachers as Lever, who, from the London pulpits, denounced
+      the projected marriage, hinting darkly at the truth of Amy Dudley's death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was hinted at home was openly expressed abroad, and in Paris Mary
+      Stuart ventured a cruel witticism that Elizabeth was to conserve in her
+      memory: &ldquo;The Queen of England,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;is about to marry her
+      horse-keeper, who has killed his wife to make a place for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet Elizabeth persisted in her intent to marry Dudley, until the sober
+      Cecil conveyed to her towards the end of that month of September some
+      notion of the rebellion that was smouldering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She flared out at him, of course. But he stood his ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is,&rdquo; he reminded her, &ldquo;this unfortunate matter of a prophecy, as
+      the Bishop of Aquila persists in calling it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God's Body! Is the rogue blabbing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else did your Majesty expect from a man smarting under a sense of
+      injury? He has published it broadcast that on the day before Lady Robert
+      broke her neck, you told him that she was dead or nearly so. And he argues
+      from it a guilty foreknowledge on your Majesty's part of what was
+      planned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A guilty foreknowledge!&rdquo; She almost choked in rage, and then fell to
+      swearing as furiously in that moment as old King Harry at his worst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame!&rdquo; he cried, shaken by her vehemence. &ldquo;I but report the phrase he
+      uses. It is not mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you believe it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not, madame. If I did I should not be here at present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does any subject of mine believe it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They suspend their judgment. They wait to learn the truth from the
+      sequel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That if your motive prove to be such as de Quadra and others allege, they
+      will be in danger of believing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be plain, man, in God's name. What exactly is alleged?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He obeyed her very fully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That my lord contrived the killing of his wife so that he might have
+      liberty to marry your Majesty, and that your Majesty was privy to the
+      deed.&rdquo; He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before she could let loose her
+      wrath. &ldquo;It is still in your power, madame, to save your honour, which is
+      now in peril. But there is only one way in which you can accomplish it. If
+      you put from you all thought of marrying Lord Robert, England will believe
+      that de Quadra and those others lied. If you persist and carry out your
+      intention, you proclaim the truth of his report; and you see what must
+      inevitably follow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a few hours of that interview she delivered her answer to Cecil,
+      which was that she had no intention of marrying Dudley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing her heart, by
+      renouncing marriage with the only man she could have taken for her mate of
+      all who had wooed her. Yet the wound of that renunciation was slow to
+      heal. She trifled with the notion of other marriages, but ever and anon,
+      in her despair, perhaps, we see her turning longing eyes towards the
+      handsome Lord Robert, later made Earl of Leicester. Once, indeed, some six
+      years after Amy's death, there was again some talk of her marrying him,
+      which was quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how Amy died.
+      Between these two, between the fulfilment of her desire and his ambition,
+      stood the irreconcilable ghost of his poor murdered wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression in her
+      passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's child:
+      &ldquo;The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but a barren
+      stock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII. SIR JUDAS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred voyage to
+      El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural, seeing that Sir
+      Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but also Sir Walter's very good
+      friend and kinsman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality as kinsman or as
+      Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him, the cordiality of the latter's
+      embrace and the noble entertainment following at the house of Sir
+      Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis conducted him, set this
+      doubt at rest and relighted the lamp of hope in the despairing soul of our
+      adventurer. In Sir Lewis he saw only his kinsman&mdash;his very good
+      friend and kinsman, to insist upon Stukeley's own description of himself&mdash;at
+      a time when of all others in his crowded life he needed the support of a
+      kinsman and the guidance of a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the brightest
+      ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might have added lustre to
+      that of King James, had not his Sowship&mdash;to employ the title bestowed
+      upon that prince by his own queen&mdash;been too mean of soul to
+      appreciate the man's great worth. Courtier, philosopher, soldier, man of
+      letters and man of action alike, Ralegh was at once the greatest
+      prose-writer, and one of the greatest captains of his age, the last
+      survivor of that glorious company&mdash;whose other members were Drake and
+      Frobisher and Hawkins&mdash;that had given England supremacy upon the
+      seas, that had broken the power and lowered the pride of Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His was a name that had resounded, to the honour and glory of England,
+      throughout the world, a name that, like Drake's, was a thing of hate and
+      terror to King Philip and his Spaniards; yet the King of Scots, unclean of
+      body and of mind, who had succeeded to the throne of Elizabeth, must
+      affect ignorance of that great name which shall never die while England
+      lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the splendid courtier stood before him&mdash;for at fifty Sir Walter
+      was still handsome of person and magnificent of Apparel&mdash;James looked
+      him over and inquired who he might be. When they had told him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've rawly heard of thee,&rdquo; quoth the royal punster, who sought by such
+      atrocities of speech to be acclaimed a wit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see this great
+      and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge of high treason,
+      bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal, peddling lawyers, and,
+      finally, although his wit and sincerity had shattered every fragment of
+      evidence brought against him, sentenced to death. Thus far James went; but
+      he hesitated to go further, hesitated to carry out the sentence. Sir
+      Walter had too many friends in England then; the memory of his glorious
+      deeds was still too fresh in the public mind, and execution might have
+      been attended by serious consequences for King James. Besides, one at
+      least of the main objects was achieved. Sir Walter's broad acres were
+      confiscate by virtue of that sentence, and King James wanted the land&mdash;filched
+      thus from one who was England's pride&mdash;to bestow it upon one of those
+      golden calves of his who were England's shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I maun hae the land for Carr. I maun hae it,&rdquo; was his brazen and peevish
+      answer to an appeal against the confiscation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For thirteen years Sir Walter lay in the Tower, under that sentence of
+      death passed in 1603, enjoying after a season a certain liberty, visited
+      there by his dear lady and his friends, among whom was Henry, Prince of
+      Wales, who did not hesitate to publish that no man but his father&mdash;whom
+      he detested&mdash;would keep such a bird in a cage. He beguiled the time
+      in literary and scientific pursuits, distilling his essences and writing
+      that stupendous work of his, &ldquo;The History of the World.&rdquo; Thus old age
+      crept upon him; but far from quenching the fires of enterprise within his
+      adventurer's soul, it brought a restlessness that urged him at last to
+      make a bid for liberty. Despairing of winning it from the clemency of
+      James, he applied his wits to extracting it from the King's cupidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Throughout his life, since the day when first he had brought himself to
+      the notice of a Queen by making of his cloak a carpet for her feet, he had
+      retained side by side with the dignity of the sage and the greatness of
+      the hero, the craft and opportunism of the adventurer. His opportunity now
+      was the straitened condition of the royal treasury, a hint of which had
+      been let fall by Winwood the Secretary of State. He announced at once that
+      he knew of a gold mine in Guiana, the El Dorado of the Spaniards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his return from a voyage to Guiana in 1595, he had written of it thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There the common soldier shall fight for gold instead of pence, pay
+      himself with plates half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his bones in
+      other wars for provant and penury Those commanders and chieftains that
+      shoot at honour and abundance shall find here more rich and beautiful
+      cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled
+      with treasure than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Winwood now reminded him that as a consequence many expeditions had gone
+      out, but failed to discover any of these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Ralegh, &ldquo;is because those adventurers were ignorant alike of
+      the country and of the art of conciliating its inhabitants. Were I
+      permitted to go, I would make Guiana to England what Peru has been to
+      Spain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That statement, reported to James in his need, was enough to fire his
+      cupidity, and when Ralegh had further added that he would guarantee to the
+      Crown one-fifth of the treasure without asking any contribution towards
+      the adventure either in money or in ships, he was permitted to come forth
+      and prepare for the expedition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His friends came to his assistance, and in March of 1617 he set sail for
+      El Dorado with a well-manned and well-equipped fleet of fourteen ships,
+      the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke standing sureties for his return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the outset the fates were unpropitious. Disaster closed the
+      adventure. Gondomar, the Ambassador of Spain at Whitehall, too
+      well-informed of what was afoot, had warned his master. Spanish ships
+      waited to frustrate Sir Walter, who was under pledge to avoid all conflict
+      with the forces of King Philip. But conflict there was, and bloodshed in
+      plenty, about the city of Manoa, which the Spaniards held as the key to
+      the country into which the English adventurers sought to penetrate. Among
+      the slain were the Governor of Manoa, who was Gondomar's own brother, and
+      Sir Walter's eldest son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Ralegh, waiting at the mouth of the Orinoco, came his beaten forces in
+      retreat, with the terrible news of a happening that meant his ruin.
+      Half-maddened, his anguish increased by the loss of his boy, he upbraided
+      them so fiercely that Keymis, who had been in charge of the expedition,
+      shut himself up in his cabin and shot himself with a pocket-pistol. Mutiny
+      followed, and Whitney&mdash;most trusted of Sir Walter's captains&mdash;set
+      sail for England, being followed by six other ships of that fleet, which
+      meanwhile had been reduced to twelve. With the remaining five the stricken
+      Sir Walter had followed more at leisure. What need to hurry? Disgrace, and
+      perhaps death, awaited him in England. He knew the power of Spain with
+      James, who was so set upon a Spanish marriage for his heir, knew Spain's
+      hatred of himself, and what eloquence it would gather in the mouth of
+      Gondomar, intent upon avenging his brother's death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He feared the worst, and so was glad upon landing to have by him a kinsman
+      upon whom he could lean for counsel and guidance in this the darkest hour
+      of all his life. Sitting late that night in the library of Sir Christopher
+      Hare's house, Sir Walter told his cousin in detail the story of his
+      misadventure, and confessed to his misgivings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My brains are broken,&rdquo; was his cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not expected,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;that you would return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not expected?&rdquo; Sir Walter's bowed white head was suddenly flung back.
+      Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed. &ldquo;What act in
+      all my life justified the belief I should be false to honour? My danger
+      here was made quite plain, and Captain King would have had me steer a
+      course for France, where I had found a welcome and a harbour. But to
+      consent I must have been false to my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who
+      were sureties to the King for my return. Life is still sweet to me,
+      despite my three-score years and more, but honour is sweeter still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, because life was sweet, he bluntly asked his cousin: &ldquo;What is
+      the King's intent by me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, now,&rdquo; said Stukeley, &ldquo;who shall know what passes in the King's mind?
+      From the signs, I judge your case to be none so desperate. You have good
+      friends in plenty, among whom, although the poorest, count myself the
+      first. Anon, when you are rested, we'll to London by easy stages, baiting
+      at the houses of your friends, and enlisting their good offices on your
+      behalf.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ralegh took counsel on the matter with Captain King, a bluff,
+      tawny-bearded seaman, who was devoted to him body and soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Lewis proposes it, eh?&rdquo; quoth the hardy seaman. &ldquo;And Sir Lewis is
+      Vice-Admiral of Devon? He is not by chance bidden to escort you to
+      London?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain, clearly, had escaped the spell of Stukeley's affability. Sir
+      Walter was indignant. He had never held his kinsman in great esteem, and
+      had never been on the best of terms with him in the past. Nevertheless, he
+      was very far from suspecting him of what King implied. To convince him
+      that he did Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt question to his
+      kinsman in King's presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said Sir Lewis, &ldquo;I am not yet bidden to escort you. But as
+      Vice-Admiral of Devon I may at any moment be so bidden. It were wiser, I
+      hold, not to await such an order. Though even if it come,&rdquo; he made haste
+      to add, &ldquo;you may still count upon my friendship. I am your kinsman first,
+      and Vice-Admiral after.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a smile that irradiated his handsome, virile countenance, Sir Walter
+      held out his hand to clasp his cousin's in token of appreciation. Captain
+      King expressed no opinion save what might be conveyed in a grunt and a
+      shrug.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Guided now unreservedly by his cousin's counsel, Sir Walter set out with
+      him upon that journey to London. Captain King went with them, as well as
+      Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a Frenchman named Manourie, who
+      had made his first appearance in the Plymouth household on the previous
+      day. Stukeley explained the fellow as a gifted man of medicine, whom he
+      had sent for to cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment by which he
+      was afflicted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Journeying by slow stages, as Sir Lewis had directed, they came at last to
+      Brentford. Sir Walter, had he followed his own bent, would have journeyed
+      more slowly still, for in a measure, as he neared London, apprehensions of
+      what might await him there grew ever darker. He spoke of them to King, and
+      the blunt Captain said nothing to dispel them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are being led like a sheep to the shambles,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;and you go
+      like a sheep. You should have landed in France, where you have friends.
+      Even now it is not too late. A ship could be procured...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And my honour could be sunk at sea,&rdquo; Sir Walter harshly concluded, in
+      reproof of such counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at the inn at Brentford he was sought out by a visitor, who brought
+      him the like advice in rather different terms. This was De Chesne, the
+      secretary of the French envoy, Le Clerc. Cordially welcomed by Ralegh, the
+      Frenchman expressed his deep concern to see Sir Walter under arrest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You conclude too hastily,&rdquo; laughed Sir Walter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur, I do not conclude. I speak of what I am inform'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Misinformed, sir. I am not a prisoner&mdash;at least, not yet,&rdquo; he added,
+      with a sigh. &ldquo;I travel of my own free will to London with my good friend
+      and kinsman Stukeley to lay the account of my voyage before the King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of your own free will? You travel of your own free will? And you are not
+      a prisoner? Ha!&rdquo; There was bitter mockery in De Chesne's short laugh.
+      &ldquo;C'est bien drole!&rdquo; And he explained: &ldquo;Milord the Duke o Buckingham, he
+      has write in his master's name to the ambassador Gondomar that you are
+      taken and held at the disposal of the King of Spain. Gondomar is to inform
+      him whether King Philip wish that you be sent to Spain to essay the
+      justice of his Catholic Majesty, or that you suffer here. Meanwhile your
+      quarters are being made ready in the Tower. Yet you tell me you are not
+      prisoner! You go of your own free will to London. Sir Walter, do not be
+      deceive'. If you reach London, you are lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now here was news to shatter Sir Walter's last illusion. Yet desperately
+      he clung to the fragments of it. The envoy's secretary must be at fault.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tis yourself are at fault, Sir Walter, in that you trust those about
+      you,&rdquo; the Frenchman insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. &ldquo;D'ye mean Stukeley?&rdquo; quoth he,
+      half-indignant already at the mere suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman.&rdquo; De Chesne shrugged. &ldquo;You should know your
+      family better than I. But who is this Manourie who accompanies you? Where
+      is he come from? What you know of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation. A spy who does not
+      scruple to sell his own people. And I know that letters of commission from
+      the Privy Council for your arrest were give' to him in London ten days
+      ago. Whether those letters were to himself, or he was just the messenger
+      to another, imports nothing. The fact is everything. The warrant against
+      you exists, and it is in the hands of one or another of those that
+      accompany you. I say no more. As I have tol' you, you should know your own
+      family. But of this be sure, they mean that you go to the Tower, and so to
+      your death. And now, Sir Walter, if I show you the disease I also bring
+      the remedy. I am command' by my master to offer you a French barque which
+      is in the Thames, and a safe conduct to the Governor of Calais. In France
+      you will find safety and honour, as your worth deserve'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Up sprang Sir Walter from his chair, and flung off the cloak of thought in
+      which he had been mantled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Impossible! There is my plighted word to return,
+      and there are my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who are sureties for me. I
+      cannot leave them to suffer by my default.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will not suffer at all,&rdquo; De Chesne assured him. He was very well
+      informed. &ldquo;King James has yielded to Spain partly because he fears, partly
+      because he will have a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, and will do
+      nothing to trouble his good relations with King Philip. But, after all,
+      you have friends, whom his Majesty also fears. If you escape' you would
+      resolve all his perplexities. I do not believe that any obstacle will be
+      offer' to your escape&mdash;else why they permit you to travel thus
+      without any guard, and to retain your sword?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Half distracted as he was by what he had learnt, yet Sir Walter clung
+      stoutly and obstinately to what he believed to be the only course for a
+      man of honour. And so he dismissed De Chesne with messages of gratitude
+      but refusal to his master, and sent for Captain King. Together they
+      considered all that the secretary had stated, and King agreed with De
+      Chesne's implied opinion that it was Sir Lewis himself who held the
+      warrant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sent for him at once, and Ralegh straightly taxed him with it. Sir
+      Lewis as straightly admitted it, and when King thereupon charged him with
+      deceit he showed no anger, but only the profoundest grief. He sank into a
+      chair, and took his head in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could I do? What could I do?&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;The warrant came in the
+      very moment we were setting out. At first I thought of telling you; and
+      then I bethought me that to do so would be but to trouble your mind,
+      without being able to offer you help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter understood what was implied. &ldquo;Did you not say,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;that
+      you were my kinsman first and Vice-Admiral of Devon after?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay&mdash;and so I am. Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral, which
+      has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape, I'd never
+      hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as closely as he
+      watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And that is why I have held
+      my peace on the score of this warrant. What can it help that I should
+      trouble you with the matter until at the same time I can offer you some
+      way out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Frenchman has a throat, and throats can be slit,&rdquo; said the downright
+      King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them,&rdquo; returned Sir
+      Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first argument, using now
+      such forceful logic and obvious sincerity that Sir Walter was convinced.
+      He was no less convinced, too, of the peril in which he stood. He plied
+      those wits of his, which had rarely failed him in an extremity. Manourie
+      was the difficulty. But in his time he had known many of these agents who,
+      without sentimental interest and purely for the sake of gold, were ready
+      to play such parts; and never yet had he known one who was not to be
+      corrupted. So that evening he desired Manourie's company in the room above
+      stairs that had been set apart for Sir Walter's use. Facing him across the
+      table at which both were seated, Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon
+      the board, and, suddenly opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady eyes
+      with the jewel sparkling in his palm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-featured
+      fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's grimly smiling eyes,
+      then again at the white diamond, from which the candlelight was striking
+      every colour of the rainbow. He made a shrewd estimate of its price, and
+      shook his black head. He had quite recovered from the shock of Sir
+      Walter's question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not half as much,&rdquo; he confessed, with impudence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you might find it more remunerative to serve me,&rdquo; said the knight.
+      &ldquo;This jewel is to be earned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The agent's eyes flickered; he passed his tongue over his lips. &ldquo;As how?&rdquo;
+       quoth he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Briefly thus: I have but learnt of the trammel in which I am taken. I
+      must have time to concert my measures of escape, and time is almost at an
+      end. You are skilled in drugs, so my kinsman tells me. Can you so drug me
+      as to deceive physicians that I am in extremis?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Manourie considered awhile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I... I think I could,&rdquo; he answered presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say.. two such stones?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it was
+      prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir Walter's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About it, then.&rdquo; Sir Walter rolled the gem across the board into the
+      clutch of the spy, which pounced to meet it. &ldquo;Keep that in earnest. The
+      other will follow when we have cozened them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning Sir Walter could not resume the journey. When Cotterell went
+      to dress him he found his master taken with vomits, and reeling like a
+      drunkard. The valet ran to fetch Sir Lewis, and when they returned
+      together they found Sir Walter on all fours gnawing the rushes on the
+      floor, his face livid and horribly distorted, his brow glistening with
+      sweat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stukeley, in alarm, ordered Cotterell to get his master back to bed and to
+      foment him, which was done. But on the next day there was no improvement,
+      and on the third things were in far more serious case. The skin of his
+      brow and arms and breast was inflamed, and covered with horrible purple
+      blotches&mdash;the result of an otherwise harmless ointment with which the
+      French empiric had supplied him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Stukeley beheld him thus disfigured, and lying apparently inert and
+      but half-conscious upon his bed, he backed away in terror. The
+      Vice-Admiral had seen afore-time the horrible manifestations of the
+      plague, and could not be mistaken here. He fled from the infected air of
+      his kinsman's chamber, and summoned what physicians were available to
+      pronounce and prescribe. The physicians came&mdash;three in number&mdash;but
+      manifested no eagerness to approach the patient closely. The mere sight of
+      him was enough to lead them to the decision that he was afflicted with the
+      plague in a singularly virulent form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently one of them plucked up courage so far as to feel the pulse of
+      the apparently delirious patient. Its feebleness confirmed his diagnosis;
+      moreover the hand he held was cold and turgid. He was not to know that Sir
+      Walter had tightly wrapped about his upper arm the ribbon from his
+      poniard, and so he was entirely deceived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians withdrew, and delivered their verdict, whereupon Sir Lewis
+      at once sent word of it to the Privy Council.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the news,
+      came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter's chamber by
+      Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman's amazement he
+      found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a hand-mirror a face that
+      was horrible beyond description with the complacent smile of one who takes
+      satisfaction in his appearance. Yet there was no fevered madness in the
+      smiling eyes. They were alive with intelligence, amounting, indeed, to
+      craft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, King!&rdquo; was the glad welcome &ldquo;The prophet David did make himself a
+      fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard, to escape from the
+      hands of his enemies And there was Brutus, ay, and others as memorable who
+      have descended to such artifice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Though he laughed, it is clear that he was seeking to excuse an
+      unworthiness of which he was conscious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Artifice?&rdquo; quoth King, aghast. &ldquo;Is this artifice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay&mdash;a hedge against my enemies, who will be afraid to approach me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      King sat himself down by his master's bed. &ldquo;A better hedge against your
+      enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of sea 'twixt here and
+      France. Would to Heaven you had done as I advised ere you set foot in this
+      ungrateful land.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The omission may be repaired,&rdquo; said Sir Walter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir Walter had
+      been reconsidering De Chesne's assurance touching my Lords of Arundel and
+      Pembroke, and he had come to conclude&mdash;the more readily, perhaps
+      because it was as he would have it&mdash;that De Chesne was right; that to
+      break faith with them were no such great matter after all, nor one for
+      which they would be called upon to suffer. And so, now, when it was all
+      but too late, he yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and consented
+      to save himself by flight to France. King was to go about the business of
+      procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need of desperate
+      haste, as was shown when presently orders came to Brentford for the
+      disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at Salisbury, desired that Sir
+      Walter should be conveyed to his own house in London. Stukeley reported
+      this to him, proclaiming it a sign of royal favour. Sir Walter was not
+      deceived. He knew the reason to be fear lest he should infect the Tower
+      with the plague by which he was reported stricken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London, and
+      safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his loving
+      friend and kinsman. Manourie's part being fulfilled and the aim
+      accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment by bestowing upon
+      him the second diamond&mdash;a form of eminently portable currency with
+      which the knight was well supplied. On the morrow Manourie was gone,
+      dismissed as a consequence of the part he had played.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this&mdash;a very well informed and
+      injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to forfeit the
+      knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter secretly concerted
+      means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to trust him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he considered
+      King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him of his kinsman's
+      general neediness, remembered past events that shed light upon his ways
+      and nature, and began now at last to have a sense of the man's hypocrisy
+      and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned in regard to him precisely as he had
+      reasoned in regard to Manourie. The fellow was acquisitive, and therefore
+      corruptible. If, indeed, he was so base that he had been bought to betray
+      Sir Walter, then he could be bought again to betray those who had so
+      bought him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, nay,&rdquo; said Sir Walter easily. &ldquo;It is not lack of trust in you, my
+      good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and knowing as I do the
+      upright honesty of your character I feared to embarrass you with things
+      whose very knowledge must give you the parlous choice of being false to
+      that office or false to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most
+      accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have fallen
+      to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin remember.
+      It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had gained to
+      attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this
+      notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose
+      his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had paid for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As to that, you shall be at no loss,&rdquo; Sir Walter assured him. &ldquo;I could
+      not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you shall have a
+      thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am safely landed in France
+      or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what is to come, here is a toy of
+      value for you.&rdquo; And he presented Sir Lewis with a jewel of price, a great
+      ruby encrusted in diamonds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir Lewis was
+      ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir Walter's plans, and to
+      render him all possible assistance. True, this assistance was a costly
+      matter; there was this person to be bought and that one; there were
+      expenses here and expenses there, incurred by Sir Lewis on his kinsman's
+      behalf; and there were odd presents, too, which Stukeley seemed to expect
+      and which Sir Walter could not deny him. He had no illusions now that King
+      had been right; that here he was dealing with a rogue who would exact the
+      uttermost farthing for his services, but he was gratified at the
+      shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's measure, and did not
+      grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the scaffold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his master's offer
+      of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such other assistance as Sir
+      Walter might require But by now the knight's arrangements were complete.
+      His servant Cotterell had come to inform him that his own boatswain, now
+      in London, was the owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury,
+      admirably suited for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's disposal.
+      It had been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King, that they
+      should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell was bidden
+      desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea at once. In view
+      of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily compromising the French envoy,
+      Sir Walter gratefully declined the latter's offer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the flight.
+      Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of Manourie's
+      ointment, had practically recovered his normal appearance, covering his
+      long white hair under a Spanish hat, and muffling the half of his face in
+      the folds of a cloak, came to Wapping Stairs&mdash;that ill-omened place
+      of execution of pirates and sea-rovers&mdash;accompanied by Cotterell, who
+      carried the knight's cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son. Out
+      of solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could not
+      part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage. At the head of
+      the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the foot of them a boat was
+      waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at the tiller.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You feared perhaps we should not come,&rdquo; said Stukeley, with a sneer at
+      the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. &ldquo;Yet now, I trust, you'll do me the
+      justice to admit that I have shown myself an honest man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope that you'll continue so,&rdquo; he answered stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore glided
+      slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the ebbing tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-out,
+      observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher up the river.
+      At first he saw it breast the stream as if proceeding towards London
+      Bridge, then abruptly swing about and follow them. Instantly he drew the
+      attention of Sir Walter to that pursuing wherry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's this?&rdquo; quoth Sir Walter harshly. &ldquo;Are we betrayed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their oars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put back,&rdquo; Sir Walter bade them. &ldquo;I'll not betray my friends to no
+      purpose. Put back, and let us home again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, now,&rdquo; said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry. &ldquo;We are
+      more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose be such as you
+      suspect&mdash;for which suspicion, when all is said, there is no ground.
+      On then!&rdquo; He addressed himself to the watermen, whipping out a pistol, and
+      growing truculent in mien and voice. &ldquo;To your oars! Row, you dogs, or I'll
+      pistol you where you sit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But Sir Walter
+      was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the wisdom of keeping
+      to their down-stream course if they were being followed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But are we followed?&rdquo; cried the impatient Sir Lewis. &ldquo;'Sdeath, cousin, is
+      not the river a highway for all the world to use, and must every wherry
+      that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us? If you are to halt at
+      every shadow, faith, you'll never accomplish anything. I vow I am
+      unfortunate in having a friend whom I would save so full of doubts and
+      fears.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that he had
+      suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under Stukeley's suasion, now
+      threw themselves heartily into their task, and onward sped the boat
+      through the deepening night, taking but little account of that other
+      wherry that hung ever in their wake. In this wise they came at length to
+      Greenwich on the last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning to
+      grow against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's
+      enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring that
+      they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade them put
+      him ashore at Purfleet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that's the soundest counsel,&rdquo; quoth the boatswain. &ldquo;For at Purfleet
+      we can get horses on to Tilbury.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical Captain
+      King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tis useless,&rdquo; he declared to them. &ldquo;At this hour how shall you get
+      horses to go by land?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other wherry
+      bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A
+      hail came to them across the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!&rdquo; cried Ralegh bitterly, and Stukeley swore
+      more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him. &ldquo;Put ashore,&rdquo; he said
+      shortly, &ldquo;and let us home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the enterprise,
+      and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be said to me for this
+      active assistance in your escape?&rdquo; His voice was gloomy, his face drawn
+      and white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to seize on
+      my private papers?&rdquo; suggested the ingenious mind of Ralegh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?&rdquo; His loom was deepening to
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account. His
+      generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his friends than
+      with his own doom. He desired to make amends to Stukeley, but had no means
+      save such as lay in the power of that currency he used. Having naught else
+      to give, he must give that. He plunged his hand into an inner pocket, and
+      brought forth a handful of jewels, which he thrust upon his kinsman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Courage,&rdquo; he urged him. &ldquo;Up now, and we may yet win out and home, so that
+      all will be well with you at least, and you shall not suffer for your
+      friendship to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to serve him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and almost at the
+      same moment the other wherry grounded immediately above them. Men sprang
+      from her, with the obvious intent of cutting off their retreat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too late!&rdquo; said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion now that the
+      dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost. &ldquo;You must act on my
+      suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, there is no other course,&rdquo; Sir Lewis agreed. &ldquo;And you are in the
+      same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined with me but to
+      betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each supporting the other...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor,&rdquo; roared the Captain
+      furiously. &ldquo;And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld understand my
+      meaning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So, so?&rdquo; said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was observed
+      that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken their stand beside
+      him as if in readiness for action. &ldquo;Why, then, since you will have it so,
+      Captain, I arrest you, in the King's name, on a charge of abetting
+      treason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer amazement. Then
+      he groped for a pistol to do at last what he realized he should have done
+      long since. Instantly he was overpowered. It was only then that Sir Walter
+      understood the thing that had happened, and with understanding came fury.
+      The old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his rapier to put
+      it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But he was too late.
+      Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held by the men from the
+      wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert, whom he knew for Stukeley's
+      cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert formally asking him for the surrender of
+      his sword.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked coldly at his
+      kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the growing light of the
+      early summer dawn &ldquo;Sir Lewis,&rdquo; was all he said, &ldquo;these actions will not
+      turn out to your credit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full one. His
+      dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending first
+      to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty husk to
+      the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with the hare
+      and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had
+      done no less. Amongst them they had &ldquo;cozened the great cozener&rdquo;&mdash;to
+      use Stukeley's own cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial
+      that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it was
+      only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant of
+      immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might the more
+      effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter discovered also
+      that the ship in which he had landed, and other matters, were to provide
+      additional Judas' fees to this acquisitive betrayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices unworthy
+      the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost he conducted
+      himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond equal. So calm and
+      self-possessed and masterly was his defence from the charge of piracy
+      preferred at the request of Spain, and so shrewd in its inflaming appeal
+      to public opinion, that his judges were constrained to abandon that line
+      of prosecution, and could discover no way of giving his head to King James
+      save by falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence of death against
+      him. Of this they now ordered execution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it met death
+      as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with that elegance and
+      richness which all his life he had observed. He wore a ruff band and black
+      velvet wrought nightgown over a doublet of hair-coloured satin, a black
+      wrought waistcoat, black cut taffety breeches and ash-coloured silk
+      stockings. Under his plumed hat he covered his white locks with a wrought
+      nightcap. This last he bestowed on his way to the scaffold upon a
+      bald-headed old man who had come to take a last look of him, with the
+      observation that he was more in need of it than himself. When he had
+      removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as usual. This
+      was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the prison of the
+      Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir Walter had put him off with
+      a laugh and a jest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let them comb it that shall have it,&rdquo; he had said of his own head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him with the
+      observation that he had a long journey before him, he called for the axe,
+      and, when presented to him, ran his fingers along the edge, and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sharp medicine,&rdquo; quoth he, &ldquo;but a sound cure for all diseases.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the East:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his heart
+      lies right,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus passed one of England's greatest heroes, indeed one of the very
+      makers of this England, and than his death there is no more shameful blot
+      upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean of body and
+      of soul, who sacrificed him to the King of Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words&mdash;as men must
+      ever suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth&mdash;declared that
+      England had not such another head to cut off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of him was
+      destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely forthcoming for
+      knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the gold coin of
+      the realm by the operation known to-day as &ldquo;clipping,&rdquo; and with him was
+      taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness
+      against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself by
+      purchasing his pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he
+      possessed, and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of
+      honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir Walter
+      Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration throughout the land, and
+      to be commonly known as &ldquo;Sir Judas.&rdquo; At Whitehall he suffered rebuffs and
+      insults that found a climax in the words addressed to him by the Lord
+      Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of his office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men offer
+      thyself in my presence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a man of
+      honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On my soul,
+      if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the country
+      would not suffice, so great is the number.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      He was Insolence incarnate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks had
+      attracted the attention of King James&mdash;notoriously partial to
+      good-looking lads&mdash;and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to his
+      Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a series of acts
+      of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing the vanity and levity
+      inherent in his nature. Scarcely was he established in the royal favour
+      than he distinguished himself by striking an offending gentleman in the
+      very presence of his sovereign&mdash;an act of such gross disrespect to
+      royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded, had not
+      the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly maimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even greater
+      than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to show that
+      the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the main planks of that
+      scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his head.
+      Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless, insolent,
+      irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple country squire
+      with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had risen to be, as
+      Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that, as
+      John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness in him&mdash;of
+      the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as megalomania He
+      lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect for anybody or
+      anything. The Commons of England and the immensely dignified Court of
+      Spain&mdash;during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at Madrid&mdash;were
+      alike the butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But the crowning
+      insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act of which was
+      played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the banks of the river
+      Somme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three weeks ago&mdash;on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise&mdash;Buckingham
+      had arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task
+      of conducting to England the King of France's sister, Henrietta Maria, who
+      three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of his
+      mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion for
+      ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was proverbially
+      renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due to himself to
+      extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming to the Louvre he
+      literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet with a short cloak
+      in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with diamonds to the value
+      of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond clasped the heron's plume
+      in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of his sword; diamonds studded
+      his very spurs, which were of beaten gold; the highest orders of England,
+      Spain, and France flamed on his breast. On the occasion of his second
+      visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of intent so lightly sewn with
+      pearls that as he moved he shook them off like raindrops, and left them to
+      lie where they fell, as largesse for pages and the lesser fry of the
+      Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal effulgence.
+      His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth of gold, and
+      some seven hundred people made up his train. There were musicians,
+      watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a score of cooks, as
+      many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six outriders, and twenty
+      gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all arrayed as became the
+      satellites of a star of such great magnitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the
+      fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of this
+      superb and scintillating ambassador.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might have
+      made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent assurance was proof
+      against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious only that
+      what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with an air of
+      easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was nothing that
+      was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with the gloomy Louis
+      XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more intoxicated with his
+      very obvious success, he condescended to observe approvingly the fresh
+      beauty of the young Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be one of the
+      most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good height and carriage,
+      slight, and very gracefully built, of a ravishing fairness of skin and
+      hair, whilst a look of wistfulness had come to invest with an indefinable
+      tenderness her splendid eyes. Her childless marriage to the young King of
+      France, which had endured now for ten years, had hardly been successful.
+      Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and difficult to convince of
+      error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof, throwing up between himself and
+      her a wall of coldness, almost of dislike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a story&mdash;and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it&mdash;that
+      in the early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu had fallen
+      deeply in love with her, and that she, with the mischief of an
+      irresponsible young girl, had encouraged him, merely to betray him to a
+      ridicule which his proud spirit had never been able to forgive. Be that or
+      another the reason, the fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected her
+      to his vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who by a
+      hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King's mind, and thus kept
+      ever open the gulf between the two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and admiration
+      kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling figure of my Lord of
+      Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a figure of romance, a prince out
+      of a fairy-tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his monstrous
+      arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of his vanity he would
+      add that of the love of a beautiful young queen. Perhaps he was thrilled
+      in his madness by the thought of the peril that would spice such an
+      adventure. Into that adventure he plunged forthwith. He wooed her during
+      the eight days that he abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly, contemptuous of
+      courtiers and of the very King himself. At the Louvre, at the Hotel de
+      Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother held her Court, at
+      the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the Queen's side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the Duke's
+      cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart, and may even
+      have resented that so shallow a man should have been sent to treat with a
+      statesman of his own caliber&mdash;for other business beside the marriage
+      had brought Buckingham to Paris&mdash;suggested to the King that the
+      Duke's manner in approaching the Queen lacked a proper deference, and the
+      Queen's manner of receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore the
+      King's long face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he looked on.
+      Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl was mere incense
+      to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on to greater daring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand French nobles
+      and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue, quitted Paris to accompany
+      Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England, on the first stage of her journey
+      to her new home. The King was not of the party. He had gone with Richelieu
+      to Fontainebieau, leaving it to the Queen and the Queen-Mother to
+      accompany his sister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his attentions
+      upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place should be beside the
+      carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did not apply to His Insolence of
+      Buckingham, so indifferent of whom he might slight or offend. And then the
+      devil took a hand in the game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was compelled to
+      halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the repose she required.
+      Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the presence of three queens at one and
+      the same time within its walls, the Duc de Chaulnes gave an entertainment
+      in the Citadel. Buckingham attended this, and in the dance that followed
+      the banquet it was Buckingham who led out the Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop's Palace, where it
+      was lodged, and a small company went out to take the evening cool in the
+      Bishop's fragrant gardens on the Somme, Buckingham ever at the Queen's
+      side. Anne of Austria was attended by her Mistress of the Household, the
+      beautiful, witty Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, and by her equerry,
+      Monsieur de Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for cavalier that handsome
+      coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of Buckingham's creatures, between whom
+      and herself a certain transient tenderness had sprung up. M. de Putange
+      was accompanied by Madame de Vernet, with whom at the time he was over
+      head and ears in love. Elsewhere about the spacious gardens other
+      courtiers sauntered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply engrossed
+      in their respective companions, or else the state of their own hearts and
+      the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them complacently towards the
+      affair of gallantry upon which their mistress almost seemed to wish to be
+      embarked. They forgot, it would seem, that she was a queen, and remembered
+      sympathetically that she was a woman, and that she had for companion the
+      most splendid cavalier in all the world. Thus they committed the
+      unpardonable fault of lagging behind, and allowing her to pass out of
+      their sight round the bend of an avenue by the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the Queen, that
+      the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them from observation,
+      than, piling audacity up on audacity, he determined to accomplish here and
+      now the conquest of this lovely lady who had used him so graciously and
+      received his advances with such manifest pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soft the night! How exquisite!&rdquo; he sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; she agreed. &ldquo;And how still, but for the gentle murmur of the
+      river.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The river!&rdquo; he cried, on a new note. &ldquo;That is no gentle murmur. The river
+      laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evil?&rdquo; quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now side by
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evil,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea that soon
+      shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing wickedly in the pain
+      that will presently be mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her
+      discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether she
+      took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal
+      aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had taught
+      her she must ever dwell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, you will be with us again, perhaps before
+      so very long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near her face
+      that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your pity, say
+      but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear down half a world to
+      reach you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She recoiled in fright and displeasure before a wooing so impetuous and
+      violently outspoken; though the displeasure was perhaps but a passing
+      emotion, the result of early training. Yet she contrived to answer him
+      with the proper icy dignity due to her position as a princess of Spain,
+      now Queen of France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not listen to
+      such words. You are mad, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am mad,&rdquo; he flung back. &ldquo;Mad with love&mdash;so mad that I have
+      forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the ambassador
+      there is a man, under the queen a woman&mdash;our real selves, not the
+      titles with which Fate seeks to dissemble our true natures. And with the
+      whole strength of my true nature do I love you, so potently, so
+      overwhelmingly that I will not believe you sensible of no response.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little off her
+      feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true; but also a
+      neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever addressed her in anything
+      approaching this manner, no one had ever so much as suggested that her
+      existence could matter greatly, that in her woman's nature there was the
+      magic power of awakening passion and devotion. He was so splendidly
+      magnificent, so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus to lay his
+      being, as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a little, who
+      knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to repulse him, and
+      the effort was not very convincing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It ... it
+      hurts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he wounded, for
+      she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But he in his egregious
+      vanity must of course misunderstand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurts!&rdquo; he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have warned her.
+      &ldquo;Because you resist it, because you fight against the commands of your
+      true self. Anne!&rdquo; He seized her, and crushed her to him. &ldquo;Anne!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger, too, her
+      dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A scream, loud and
+      piercing, broke from her and rang through the still garden. It brought him
+      to his senses. It was as if he had been lifted up into the air, and then
+      suddenly allowed to fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips, and when
+      an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in alarm, his hand
+      upon his sword, those two stood with the width of the avenue between them,
+      Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen breathing hard and trembling, a
+      hand upon her heaving breast as if to repress its tumult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame! Madame!&rdquo; had been Putange's cry, as he sprang forward in alarm
+      and self-reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other in
+      bewilderment. Neither spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You cried out, Madame,&rdquo; M. de Putange reminded her, and Buckingham may
+      well have wondered whether presently he would be receiving M. de Putange's
+      sword in his vitals. He must have known that his life now hung upon her
+      answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I called you, that was all,&rdquo; said the Queen, in a voice that she strove
+      to render calm. &ldquo;I confess that I was startled to find myself alone with
+      M. L'Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again, M. de Putange!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from his
+      sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions as to what
+      must have happened. But he was relieved there were to be no complications.
+      The others now coming up with them, the party thereafter kept together
+      until presently Buckingham and Lord Holland took their leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was accomplished. A
+      little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave of Henrietta Maria,
+      entrusting her now to Buckingham and his followers, who were to convey her
+      safely to Charles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to Anne of
+      Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de Conti for only
+      companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am come to take my leave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fare you well, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur,&rdquo; she said, and her voice was warm
+      and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am come to ask your pardon, madame,&rdquo; he said, in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, monsieur&mdash;no more, I beg you.&rdquo; She looked down; her hands were
+      trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none might see
+      him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld tears in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for having
+      discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were idle to ask
+      pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I can help drawing
+      breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the will to live. I gave
+      expression to something that dominates my whole being, and will ever
+      dominate it as long as I have life. Adieu, madame! At need you know where
+      a servant who will gladly die for you is to be found.&rdquo; He kissed the hem
+      of her robe, dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and was gone
+      before she could say a word in answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti, watching
+      her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will answer for the Queen's virtue,&rdquo; she stated afterwards, &ldquo;but I
+      cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart, since without
+      doubt the Duke's tears affected her spirits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he was met
+      by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him regarding the
+      negotiations he had been empowered to carry out with France in the matter
+      of an alliance against Spain&mdash;negotiations which had not thriven with
+      Louis and Richelieu, possibly because the ambassador was ill-chosen. The
+      instructions came too late to be of use, but in time to serve as a pretext
+      for Buckingham's return to Amiens. There he sought an audience of the
+      Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a futile message for the
+      King. This chimerical business&mdash;as Madame de Motteville shrewdly
+      calls it&mdash;being accomplished, he came to the real matter which had
+      prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and sought audience of
+      Anne of Austria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the levĂŠes at
+      the Court of France were precisely what the word implies, and they were
+      held by royalty whilst still abed. It was not, therefore, amazing that he
+      should have been admitted to her presence. She was alone save for her
+      lady-in-waiting, Madame de Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged, prudent and
+      virtuous. Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of this lady upon
+      seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into the room, and on
+      his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and bear it to his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de Lannoi
+      became a pillar of icy dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;M. le Duc,&rdquo; says she, &ldquo;it is not customary in France to kneel when
+      speaking to the Queen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I care nothing for the customs of France, madame,&rdquo; he answered rudely. &ldquo;I
+      am not a Frenchman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is too obvious, monsieur,&rdquo; snapped the elderly, prudent and virtuous
+      countess. &ldquo;Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps monsieur will perceive
+      the convenience of conforming to French customs. Let me call for a chair
+      for Monsieur le Duc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not want a chair, madame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, &ldquo;I suppose one cannot
+      expect anything else in a foreigner,&rdquo; and let him kneel as he insisted,
+      placing herself, however, protectingly at the Queen's pillow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi's presence no
+      more than if she had been part of the room's furniture, the Duke delivered
+      himself freely of what was in his mind. He had been obliged to return to
+      Amiens on a matter of State. It was unthinkable that he should be so near
+      to her Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her feet; and whilst
+      gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her matchless
+      perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of his soul, allow
+      himself the only felicity life now held for him&mdash;that of protesting
+      himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the kind, did he pour out,
+      what time the Queen, embarrassed and annoyed beyond utterance, could only
+      stare at him in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a rashness beyond
+      pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of women, here
+      was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King's ears, a tale that
+      must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham, in his
+      self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing. One
+      suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name linked
+      with the Queen's by the lips of scandal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She found her tongue at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur le Duc,&rdquo; she said in her confusion, &ldquo;it was not necessary, it
+      was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have leave
+      to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps to
+      the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so
+      indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and
+      reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes,
+      and hand on heart&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Adieu, madame!&rdquo; said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what had
+      passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken place
+      under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip wagging. An
+      echo of it reached the King, together with the story of that other
+      business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the Duke of
+      Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against
+      the Queen, sought to feed the King's suspicions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did she cry out, sire?&rdquo; he will have asked. &ldquo;What did M. de
+      Buckingham do to make her cry out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she did
+      cry out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he abandon
+      it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired of them a
+      close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's movements, and the fullest
+      particulars of his private life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents of
+      his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen. For he
+      intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long, and
+      complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and the
+      artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the Duke's
+      interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which followed
+      that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly
+      romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life, touching
+      it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her loneliness she came
+      to think of him with tenderness and pity, in which pity for herself and
+      her dull lot was also blent. He was away, overseas; she might never see
+      him again; therefore there could be little harm in indulging the romantic
+      tenderness he had inspired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier&mdash;as
+      La Rochefoucauld tells us&mdash;to journey to London and bear the Duke a
+      trifling memento of her&mdash;a set of diamond studs. That love-token&mdash;for
+      it amounted to no less&mdash;Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to
+      the Duke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire to
+      see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he at
+      once communicated to France that he was coming over as the ambassador of
+      the King of England to treat of certain matters connected with Spain. But
+      Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in London that portraits of
+      the Queen of France were excessively abundant at York House, the Duke's
+      residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform the King. Louis was
+      angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her guilty of any
+      indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride too deeply. All that he
+      believed was that this was merely an expression of Buckingham's
+      fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a form of vain, empty boasting
+      peculiar to megalomaniacs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of
+      Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable as
+      Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning this,
+      the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason (&ldquo;well
+      known to himself&rdquo;) and in protesting that he would go to France to see the
+      Queen with the French King's consent or without it. This was duly reported
+      to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most Christian
+      Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on the part of
+      the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who was
+      temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when
+      considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria, it
+      is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the nature of
+      a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted upon
+      believing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other
+      matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had a bitter and
+      secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself there
+      had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the Duke.
+      Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into
+      correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this
+      correspondence he managed her so craftily&mdash;says La Rochefoucauld&mdash;that
+      very soon she was, whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most
+      valuable spy near Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly
+      concerned with information that would throw light upon the real relations
+      of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her that nothing
+      was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment of the treatment
+      she had received from Buckingham, a resentment the more bitter for being
+      stifled&mdash;since for her reputation's sake she dared not have given it
+      expression&mdash;made her a very ready instrument in Richelieu's hands,
+      and there was no scrap of gossip she did not carefully gather up and
+      dispatch to him. But all was naught until one day at last she was able to
+      tell him something that set his pulses beating more quickly than their
+      habit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs constantly
+      worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the Queen of France sent
+      over to Buckingham by a messenger of her own. Here, indeed, was news. Here
+      was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed. Richelieu considered.
+      If he could but obtain possession of the studs, the rest would be easy.
+      There would be an end&mdash;and such an end!&mdash;to the King's
+      obstinate, indolent faith in his wife's indifference to that boastful,
+      flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being,
+      and wrote to the Countess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at York
+      House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young French Queen.
+      Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the evening Buckingham
+      danced with her. She was a very beautiful, accomplished and ready-witted
+      woman, and to-night his Grace found her charms so alluring that he was
+      almost disposed to blame himself for having perhaps treated her too
+      lightly. Yet she seemed at pains to show him that it was his to take up
+      again the affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She was gay,
+      arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that presently, yielding
+      to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his guests with the lady on
+      his arm, and they found themselves at the foot of the garden in the shadow
+      of the water-gate that Inigo Jones had just completed for him. My lady
+      languished at his side, permitted him to encircle her with a protecting
+      arm, and for a moment lay heavily against him. He caught her violently to
+      him, and now her ladyship, hitherto so yielding, with true feminine
+      contrariness set herself to resist him. A scuffle ensued between them. She
+      broke from him at last, and sped swift as a doe across the lawn towards
+      the lights of the great house, his Grace in pursuit between vexation and
+      amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having been fooled
+      that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could discern her nowhere.
+      Presently he made inquiries, to be told that she had desired her carriage
+      to be called, and had left York House immediately upon coming in from the
+      garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It was, in
+      fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have taken offense at
+      that which she had so obviously invited. But then she always had been a
+      perverse and provoking jade. With that reflection he put her from his
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the great house
+      were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident again. Cogitating
+      it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his fine, pointed, auburn
+      beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-laugh, he rose to undress for bed.
+      And then a cry escaped him, and brought in his valet from an adjoining
+      room. The riband of diamond studs was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in the moment
+      of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there pale, staring, and
+      moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There were upon his person a
+      dozen ornaments of greater value, any one of which could have been more
+      easily detached. This was the work of some French agent. He had made no
+      secret of whence those studs had come to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of revelation, he
+      saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly contradictory behaviour. The jade
+      had fooled him. It was she who had stolen the riband. He sat down again,
+      his head in his hands, and swiftly, link by link, he pieced together a
+      complete chain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he must adopt
+      so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was virtually the ruler
+      of England, master in these islands of an almost boundless power. That
+      power he would exert to the full this very night to thwart those enemies
+      of his own and of the Queen's, who worked so subtly in concert. Many would
+      be wronged, much harm would be done, the liberties of some thousands of
+      freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot. What did it matter? It
+      was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should cover up an
+      indiscretion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Set ink and paper yonder,&rdquo; he bade his gaping valet. &ldquo;Then go call M.
+      Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at once, and leave word
+      that I shall require a score of couriers to be in the saddle and ready to
+      set out in half an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down to
+      write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the ports of England
+      were closed by the King's express command&mdash;delivered by his minister,
+      the Duke of Buckingham&mdash;that measures were being taken&mdash;were
+      already taken in all southern ports&mdash;so that no vessel of any kind
+      should leave the island until the King's further pleasure were made known.
+      Startled, the people wondered was this enactment the forerunner of war.
+      Had they known the truth, they might have been more startled still, though
+      in a different manner. As swiftly as couriers could travel&mdash;and
+      certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape overseas&mdash;did
+      this blockade spread, until the gates of England were tight locked against
+      the outgoing of those diamond studs which meant the honour of the Queen
+      of France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones by
+      others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to say which
+      were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and Gerbier between
+      them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished, and a vessel slipped down
+      the Thames, allowed to pass by those who kept close watch to enforce the
+      royal decree, and made sail for Calais, which was beginning to manifest
+      surprise at this entire cessation of traffic from England. From that
+      vessel landed Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying the Queen of
+      France the duplicate studs, which were to replace those which she had sent
+      to Buckingham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and commerce
+      was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-four hours too late
+      for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of Carlisle. His Eminence
+      deplored a fine chance lost through the excessive power that was wielded
+      in England by the parvenu.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed and
+      reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object of his
+      desires&mdash;go to France and see the Queen. Since the country was closed
+      to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of war. Blood should
+      flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in the end he would go to
+      Paris to negotiate a peace, and that should be his opportunity. Other
+      reasons there may have been, but none so dominant, none that could not
+      have been removed by negotiation. The pretexted <i>casus belli</i> was the matter
+      of the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against their
+      king.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition. Disaster and
+      defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back in disgrace to
+      England, and the Duke found himself more detested by the people than he
+      had been already&mdash;which is saying much. He went off to seek comfort
+      at the hands of the two persons who really loved him&mdash;his doting King
+      and his splendid wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
+      insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
+      long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies and
+      mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a nation? He
+      desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to accomplish that he
+      nothing recked that he should set Europe in a blaze, nothing recked what
+      blood should be poured out, what treasure dissipated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his friends,
+      fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds, urged him to take
+      precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left,&rdquo; was his contemptuous
+      answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving the house
+      in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst superintending the
+      final preparations for that unpopular expedition, John Felton, a
+      self-appointed instrument of national vengeance, drove a knife to the hilt
+      into the Duke's breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May the Lord have mercy on your soul!&rdquo; was the pious exclamation with
+      which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances, there seems
+      to have been occasion for the prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black winter's
+      night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years, picked his way
+      carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light of a
+      lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed brown seaweed and trailing
+      green sea slime. Leaning heavily upon the arm which a sailor held out to
+      his assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that rose and fell on the
+      heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the stones, and the frail
+      craft was pushed off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness, steering
+      a course for the two great poop lanterns that were swinging rhythmically
+      high up against the black background of the night. The elderly gentleman,
+      huddled now in the stern-sheets, looked behind him&mdash;to look his last
+      upon the England he had loved and served and ruled. The lanthorn, shedding
+      its wheel of yellow light upon the jetty steps, was all of it that he
+      could now see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing there
+      above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl
+      of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying
+      man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward
+      Hyde&mdash;whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from
+      the finality of death&mdash;have reviewed in that moment those thirty
+      years of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law
+      student in the Temple when Charles I. was King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the desperate
+      fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to place the Prince of
+      Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward Hyde's care that
+      the boy was sent upon his travels. The present was not to be Hyde's first
+      experience of exile. He had known it, and of a bitter sort, in those
+      impecunious days when the Second Charles, whose steps he guided, was a
+      needy, homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal might have thrown
+      over so profitless a service. He had talents that would have commanded a
+      price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly adhering to the Stuart
+      fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly in the Stuart interest,
+      employing his great ability and statecraft, he achieved at long length the
+      restoration of the Stuarts to the Throne of England. And for all those
+      loyal, self-denying labours in exile on the Stuart behalf, all the reward
+      he had at the time was that James Stuart, Duke of York, debauched his
+      daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the Restoration; it
+      was Hyde who, when that Restoration was accomplished, took in hand and
+      carried out the difficult task of welding together the old and the new
+      conditions of political affairs. And it was Hyde who was the scapegoat
+      when things did not run the course that Englishmen desired. As the head of
+      the administration he was held responsible even for those acts which he
+      had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde who was blamed
+      when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the money in harlotry;
+      it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen was childless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to Hyde's
+      daughter Anne had now been righted by marriage with the Duke of York. Now
+      the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the people, ever ready to
+      attach most credit to that which is most incredible and fantastic,
+      believed that to ensure the succession of his own grandchildren Hyde had
+      deliberately provided Charles with a barren wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war at
+      Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde was openly
+      denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with terror and seeking a
+      victim in the blind, unreasoning way of public feeling. They broke his
+      windows, ravaged his garden, and erected a gibbet before the gates of his
+      superb mansion on the north side of Piccadilly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England, commanded
+      the love of his intimates, but did not possess those qualities of cheap
+      glitter that make for popularity with the masses. Nor did he court
+      popularity elsewhere. Because he was austere in his morals, grave and
+      sober in his conduct, he was hated by those who made up the debauched
+      court of his prince. Because he was deeply religious in his principles,
+      the Puritans mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was autocratic in his
+      policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of autocracy being done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles been half as
+      loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles. For a time, it is true,
+      the King stood his friend, and might so have continued to the end had not
+      the women become mixed up in the business. As Evelyn, the diarist, puts
+      it, this great man's fall was the work of &ldquo;the buffoones and ladys of
+      pleasure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It really is a very tangled story&mdash;this inner history of the fall of
+      Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense, it
+      is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine of Braganza, his
+      unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as much as any woman
+      wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio is not a natural and
+      proper institution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at
+      least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which was
+      anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection against
+      the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the dowry
+      offered&mdash;five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which would
+      give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of
+      Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the
+      freedom to trade in the East Indies&mdash;which Portugal had hitherto kept
+      jealously to herself&mdash;were to enable England to build up her great
+      Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough to
+      make the match desirable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662,
+      Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at
+      Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall&mdash;he stood a
+      full six feet high&mdash;lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his
+      drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded,
+      dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was as
+      graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent
+      good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife
+      they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of an
+      absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs that,
+      dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale, she had the
+      appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him. Her complexion
+      was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not
+      fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair was
+      grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great ribbon bows
+      standing out, one on each side of her head, like a pair of miniature
+      wings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary,
+      with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long
+      stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. &ldquo;They've
+      brought me a bat, not a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in
+      desperate need of money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he told Clarendon anon, &ldquo;I must swallow this black draught to
+      get the jam that goes with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he
+      coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume to
+      rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile at
+      it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Catherine was immediately attended&mdash;in the words of Grammont&mdash;by
+      six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was
+      a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where the
+      honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor woman&mdash;entirely
+      enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had married&mdash;lived in
+      a fool's paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of her
+      dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King Charles
+      she was no more than a wife <i>de jure</i>. With wives <i>de facto</i> Charles would
+      people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present wife <i>de facto</i>, the
+      mistress of his heart, the first lady of his harem, was that beautiful
+      termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl
+      of Castle-maine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no lack&mdash;there never is in such cases&mdash;of those who
+      out of concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil for
+      her, and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's association with my
+      Lady Castle-maine&mdash;an association dating back to the time when he was
+      still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge would appear to have troubled the
+      poor soul profoundly; but the climax of her distress was reached when, on
+      her coming to Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of
+      ladies-in-waiting assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The
+      forlorn little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
+      that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not to be
+      admitted to her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered,
+      debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature, manifested
+      now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation. Himself he led
+      his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife's presence, before
+      the whole Court assembled, and himself presented her to Catherine, what
+      time that Court, dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in
+      amazement at so outrageous a slight to the dignity of a queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine stiffened
+      as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually her face paled until
+      it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged pride and mortification flooded
+      her eyes. And then, as if something snapped within her brain under this
+      stress of bitter emotion, blood gushed from her nostrils, and she sank
+      back in a swoon into the arms of her Portuguese ladies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light of love
+      withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy skill in handling
+      delicate situations could avail him to save his royal dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was his wish
+      that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established as one of the
+      Queen's ladies&mdash;or, rather, since it was her ladyship's wish, and
+      since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's hands&mdash;it became necessary
+      to have the Queen instructed in what was, in her husband's view, fitting.
+      For this task he selected Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long
+      and loyally played Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide him
+      in matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated with
+      Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his Majesty was
+      bent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who shall not be
+      the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel at her decision in this
+      instance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be revoked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By whom, sire?&rdquo; the Chancellor asked him gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By her Majesty, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument,&rdquo; said
+      Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the
+      latter's boyhood. &ldquo;Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did not
+      warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you are urging.
+      Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for thrusting
+      Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have forgotten the
+      things you said then of King Louis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now invited
+      to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But anon&mdash;no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady
+      Castlemaine&mdash;he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his
+      orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Use your best endeavours,&rdquo; wrote Charles, &ldquo;to facilitate what I am sure
+      my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady
+      Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his
+      enemy so long as I live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew his
+      world from froth to dregs&mdash;having studied it under a variety of
+      conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that
+      Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest as
+      this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line:
+      &ldquo;Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do
+      promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless he
+      also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that he had
+      accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into oblivion by
+      the breath of a spiteful wanton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious
+      embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used
+      arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys, tells
+      us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk of the
+      Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in the
+      privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it were
+      plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of Charles's
+      proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal husband, and
+      fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of affection but even of
+      the respect that was her absolute due. And Charles, his purpose set, urged
+      to it by the handsome termagant whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of
+      his indolent good-nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally
+      threatening her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home
+      to Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon
+      her here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail, prevail
+      it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and submitted. And a
+      very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was not only installed
+      as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find the Queen treating her
+      with a friendliness that provoked comment and amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
+      insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of whose
+      views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware.
+      Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is
+      inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more
+      because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of her
+      hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies, members
+      of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere Chancellor
+      was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked to pull him
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain&mdash;for
+      Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor's value
+      to him&mdash;that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to work
+      upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance&mdash;most
+      fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my lady
+      and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord
+      Clarendon's gatepost:
+    </p>
+
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    Three sights to be seen:
+             Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the Chancellor
+      as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable as she could
+      have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows that her ladyship
+      had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to mar the perfection of
+      her existence, to remind her how insecure is the tenure of positions such
+      as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice to existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a day
+      when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal lover, when
+      pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part she owed it to an
+      indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure to a child of sixteen,
+      of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still
+      found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and
+      lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by the
+      assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was become the
+      toast of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly come
+      to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an impression
+      her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys you may study
+      in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in the Park with the
+      King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine, looking, as
+      he tells us, &ldquo;mighty out of humour.&rdquo; There was a moment when Miss Stewart
+      came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although she never
+      reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found its way into the
+      coinage, but abides there to this day (more perdurable than that of any
+      actual queen) in the figure of Britannia, for which she was the model.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances in
+      these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in that winter
+      of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to inquire whether he were
+      above or below&mdash;&ldquo;below&rdquo; meaning Miss Stewart's apartments on the
+      ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his Majesty was a constant
+      visitor. And since where the King goes the Court follows, and where the
+      King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted that this child now found
+      herself queening it over a court that flocked to her apartments. Gallants
+      and ladies came there to flirt and to gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
+      iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled
+      head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
+      Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white,
+      jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of gold
+      that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played in
+      silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is true,
+      some ÂŁ1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came easily
+      by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet preserve
+      her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She played
+      recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers
+      were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long room.
+      There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen gallants
+      hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a vastly different
+      sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose she could find for
+      cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with the
+      assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his Grace of
+      Buckingham, who was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms
+      of architecture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather, lounged the
+      King, languidly observing this smaller party, a faint, indolent smile on
+      his swarthy, saturnine countenance. Absently, with one hand he stroked a
+      little spaniel that was curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous,
+      plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold&mdash;there
+      were three or four such attendants about the room&mdash;proffered him a
+      cup of posset on a golden salver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel
+      under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table. Soon he found
+      himself alone with her&mdash;the others having removed themselves on his
+      approach, as jackals fall back before the coming of the lion. The last to
+      go, and with signs of obvious reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond, a
+      delicately-built, uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards standing
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
+      architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled down to a
+      mere heap of cards again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Symbol of kingly power,&rdquo; said Miss, pertly. &ldquo;You demolish better than you
+      build, sire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,&rdquo; quoth
+      he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray do. The cards are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But such is not
+      the castle I'll build you if you command me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not greater treason than to have enslaved me.&rdquo; His fine eyes were oddly
+      ardent. &ldquo;Shall I build you this castle, child?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered distractingly.
+      She fetched a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
+      prove a prison.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome, scowling
+      eyes of the neglected favourite. &ldquo;My Lady Castlemaine looks as if she
+      feared that fortune were not favouring her.&rdquo; She was so artless that
+      Charles could not be sure there was a double meaning to her speech. &ldquo;Shall
+      we go see how she is faring?&rdquo; she added, with a disregard for etiquette,
+      whose artlessness he also doubted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially with
+      beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic urbanity
+      with which he sauntered beside her across the room was no more than a mask
+      upon his chagrin. It was always thus that pretty Frances Stewart used him.
+      She always knew how to elude him and, always with that cursed air of
+      artlessness, uttered seemingly simple sentences that clung to his mind to
+      tantalize him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must prove a
+      prison.&rdquo; What had she meant by that? Must he take her to queen before she
+      would allow him to build a castle for her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew there
+      was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon, which, fearing the
+      succession of the former, and, so, of the grandchildren of the latter, as
+      a result of Catherine of Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the
+      King's divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be largely
+      responsible for the existence of that party. In her hatred for Clarendon,
+      and her blind search for weapons that would slay the Chancellor, she had,
+      if not actually invented, at least helped to give currency to the silly
+      slander that Clarendon had deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen,
+      so as to ensure the ultimate succession of his own daughter's children.
+      But she had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now
+      did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in
+      consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very moment when
+      he was consumed by passion for the unattainable, artlessly artful Frances
+      Stewart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that party's
+      mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as perhaps it did,
+      the temptation by which he was secretly assailed. He looked at Buckingham,
+      frowning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The impudent gallant made a leg. &ldquo;For a subject, sire, I believe I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles&mdash;with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
+      compelling than the serious&mdash;laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then he
+      sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because she
+      is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no fault of hers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature shrank from
+      purchasing his desires at the price of so much ignominy to the Queen.
+      Before that could come to pass it would be necessary to give the screw of
+      temptation another turn or two. And it was Miss Stewart herself who&mdash;in
+      all innocence&mdash;supplied what was required in that direction. Driven
+      to bay by the importunities of Charles, she announced at last that it was
+      her intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve herself from the
+      temptations by which she was beset, and to determine the uneasiness which,
+      through no fault of her own, her presence was occasioning the Queen; and
+      she announced further, that, so desperate had she been rendered that she
+      would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have
+      her in honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to bribe her
+      with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or any title she
+      coveted, offering her these things at the nation's expense as freely and
+      lightly as the jewels he had tossed into her lap, or the collar of pearls
+      worth sixteen hundred pounds he had put about her neck. The offers were
+      ineffectual, and Charles, driven almost to distraction by such
+      invulnerable virtue, might now have yielded to the insidious whispers of
+      divorce and re-marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the
+      game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal infatuation
+      for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a neglect that
+      amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered with bitterness how her
+      attempt to exploit her hatred of the Chancellor had recoiled upon herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost dead, she
+      made a discovery&mdash;or, rather, the King's page, the ineffable
+      Chiffinch, Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-Eunuch of the Royal
+      Seraglio, who was her ladyship's friend, made it and communicated it to
+      her There had been one ardent respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that
+      proclamation of Miss Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of
+      fifteen hundred pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here
+      his opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in constant
+      attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared the King's
+      displeasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well served in the
+      matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came one cold night towards
+      the end of February of that year 1667. Charles, going below at a late hour
+      to visit Miss Stewart, when he judged that she would be alone, was
+      informed by her maid that Miss was not receiving, a headache compelling
+      her to keep her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
+      confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine. Chiffinch had
+      introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles stiffened at sight of
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage,&rdquo; says she, on a note of irony,
+      &ldquo;although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me at my own house. I
+      come to condole with you upon the affliction and grief into which the
+      new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart has reduced your Majesty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are pleased to be amused, ma'am,&rdquo; says Charles frostily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not,&rdquo; she returned him, &ldquo;make use of reproaches which would
+      disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse frailties in myself
+      which nothing can justify, since your constancy for me deprives me of all
+      defence.&rdquo; Her ladyship, you see, had a considerable gift of sarcasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In that case, may I ask you why you have come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made the jest
+      of your own Court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madam!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at for the
+      gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the Stewart's
+      affectations, any more than you know that whilst you are denied admittance
+      to her apartments, under the presence of some indisposition, the Duke of
+      Richmond is with her now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is false,&rdquo; he was beginning, very indignantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow me, you
+      will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes you act so
+      ridiculous a part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence led him,
+      despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately come. Outside her
+      rival's door she left him, but she paused at the end of the gallery to
+      make sure that he had entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
+      chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them informing him
+      scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been very ill since his
+      Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she was, God be thanked, in a
+      very fine sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I must see,&rdquo; said the King. And, since one of the women placed
+      herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty unceremoniously
+      took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony into the
+      well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the handsome, canopied bed.
+      But far from being as he had been told, in &ldquo;a very fine sleep,&rdquo; she was
+      sitting up; and far from presenting an ailing appearance, she looked
+      radiantly well and very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with
+      golden ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
+      sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved upon
+      scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid eyes lost
+      all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might have expected that
+      he would now deliver himself with that sneering sarcasm, that indolent
+      cynicism, which he used upon occasion. But he was too deeply stirred for
+      acting. His self-control deserted him entirely. Exactly what he said has
+      not been preserved for us. All that we are told is that he signified his
+      resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and that his Grace,
+      almost petrified by the King's most royal rage, uttered never a word in
+      answer. The windows of the room overlooked the Thames. The King's eyes
+      strayed towards them. Richmond was slight of build, Charles vigorous and
+      athletic. His Grace took the door betimes lest the window should occur to
+      his Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with the outraged monarch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss Stewart
+      faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own, and she was very
+      far from attempting any such justification of herself, or her conduct, as
+      he may have expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your complaint?&rdquo;
+       she invited him challengingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn. His jaw
+      fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this she took the
+      fullest advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
+      Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am a slave
+      in a free country. I know of no engagement that should prevent me from
+      disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this is not permitted me in
+      your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe there is any power on earth can
+      prevent me going back to France, and throwing myself into a convent, there
+      to enjoy the peace denied me at this Court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was complete. On his
+      knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury he had done her. But Miss
+      was not in a forgiving humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in peace,&rdquo; said
+      she, &ldquo;you would avoid offending by a longer visit those who accompanied or
+      conducted you to my apartments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went home.
+      Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak to her again,
+      he stalked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he must also
+      have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and that in his
+      conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely ridiculous. She was
+      rightly resolved against being lightly worn by any man. If anything, the
+      reflection must have fanned his passion. It was impossible, he thought,
+      that she should love that knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no graces
+      either of body or of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit, it must be,
+      as she had all but said, so that she might be delivered from the
+      persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought of her
+      marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to Charles, and it
+      may have stifled his last scruple in the matter of the divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the Court. But
+      Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The King's messenger found
+      him gone already.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor. Clarendon's
+      habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke to the King&mdash;taking
+      the fullest advantage of the tutelary position in which for the last
+      twenty-five years he had stood to him&mdash;much as he had spoken when
+      Charles had proposed to make Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's
+      Bedchamber, saving that he was now even more uncompromising. The King was
+      not pleased with him. But just as he had had his way, despite the
+      Chancellor, in that other matter, so he would have his way despite him
+      now. This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too much
+      the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no effort to
+      avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured Queen. So he went
+      secretly to work to outwit the King. He made himself the protector of
+      those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and Miss Stewart, with the result that
+      one dark night, a week or two later, the lady stole away from the Palace
+      of Whitehall, and made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the Bridge-foot,
+      Westminster, where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And so, by the
+      secret favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent and
+      matrimony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of things in his
+      mortification. But it was not until some six weeks later that he learnt by
+      whose agency the thing had been accomplished. He learnt it, not a doubt,
+      from my Lady Castlemaine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated back to
+      the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was at last made up;
+      and once again we see her ladyship triumphant, and firmly established in
+      the amorous King's affections. She had cause to be grateful to the
+      Chancellor for this. But her vindictive nature remembered only the earlier
+      injury still unavenged. Here at last was her chance to pay off that score.
+      Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand, yet trusting in the King whom
+      he had served so well, stood his ground unintimidated and unmoved&mdash;an
+      oak that had weathered mightier storms than this. He did not dream that he
+      was in the power of an evil woman. And that woman used her power. When all
+      else failed, she told the King of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss
+      Stewart, and lest the King should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out
+      of consideration for his motives, represented him as a self-seeker, and
+      charged him with having acted thus so as to make sure of keeping his
+      daughter's children by the Duke of York in the succession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw Clarendon to the
+      wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him with a command that he should
+      surrender his seals of office. The proud old man refused to yield his
+      seals to any but the King himself. He may have hoped that the memory of
+      all that lay between them would rise up once more when they were face to
+      face. So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
+      deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile throng of
+      courtiers&mdash;&ldquo;especially the buffoones and ladys of pleasure,&rdquo; as
+      Evelyn says.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has left us a
+      vivid picture:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine was in
+      bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her smock into her
+      aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither her woman brought her
+      her nightgown; and she stood, blessing herself at the old man's going
+      away; and several of the gallants of Whitehall&mdash;of which there were
+      many staying to see the Chancellor's return&mdash;did talk to her in her
+      birdcage; among others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of
+      passage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine house in
+      Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered Strafford's fate,
+      and set out to tread once more and for the remainder of his days the path
+      of exile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters&mdash;Mary and Anne&mdash;reigned
+      successively as queens in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Count Philip KĂśnigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and particularly
+      in England, where he had been associated with his brother in the killing
+      of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century did not look for excessively
+      nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it condoned the lack of
+      virtue in Count Philip Christof KĂśnigsmark for the sake of his personal
+      beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address. The
+      court of Hanover made him warmly welcome, counting itself the richer for
+      his presence; whilst he, on his side, was retained there by the Colonelcy
+      in the Electoral Guard to which he had been appointed, and by his deep and
+      ill-starred affection for the Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the
+      Electoral Prince, who later was to reign in England as King George I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had been
+      playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where KĂśnigsmark had been
+      brought up. With adolescence he had gone out into the world to seek the
+      broader education which it offered to men of quality and spirit. He had
+      fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure
+      wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus
+      Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
+      more brightly against the dull background of that gross Hanoverian court;
+      an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of the world, in whom she
+      scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a different kind.
+      The sweet child he had known&mdash;she had been married in 1682, at the
+      age of sixteen&mdash;had come in her ten years of wedded life to the
+      fulfilment of the handsome promise of her maidenhood. But her beauty was
+      spiritualized by a certain wistfulness that had not been there before,
+      that should not have been there now had all been well. The sprightliness
+      inherent in her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
+      bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her to wit,
+      which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a little reckless of
+      how or where it offended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      KĂśnigsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and knew
+      enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her thwarted love for
+      her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted for the sake of dynastic
+      ambition, to the end that by marrying her to the Electoral Prince George
+      the whole of the Duchy of Luneberg might be united. Thus, for political
+      reasons, she had been thrust into a union that was mutually loveless; for
+      Prince George had as little affection to bring to it as herself. Yet for a
+      prince the door to compensations is ever open. Prince George's taste, as
+      is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and this taste he indulged so
+      freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness towards him with which
+      Sophia had entered the alliance was eventually converted into disgust and
+      contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on her side,
+      cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by his father, the
+      Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the latter by the Countess von
+      Platen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of state, was&mdash;with
+      the connivance of her despicable husband, who saw therein the means to his
+      own advancement&mdash;the acknowledged mistress of Ernest Augustus. She
+      was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and ill-favoured woman. Malevolence sat in
+      the creases of her painted face, and peered from her mean eyes. Yet, such
+      as she was, the Elector Ernest loved her. His son's taste for ugly women
+      would appear to have been hereditary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The princess had
+      mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not only had she never
+      troubled to dissemble the loathing which that detestable woman inspired in
+      her, but she had actually given it such free and stinging expression as
+      had provoked against Madame von Platen the derision of the court, a
+      derision so ill-concealed that echoes of it had reached its object, and
+      made her aware of the source from whence it sprang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the elegant,
+      romantic KĂśnigsmark took place. He found the stage set for comedy of a
+      grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by his recklessness, to
+      convert into tragedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him. It was
+      some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he did not lack for
+      self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-esteem that blinded him here to
+      the appalling truth. Yet in the end understanding came to him. When the
+      precise significance of the fond leer of that painted harridan's repellent
+      coquetry was borne in upon him he felt the skin of his body creep and
+      roughen But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal scamp, after all, and
+      in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to employ his gifts and his
+      knowledge of the great world in such a way as to win to eminence. He saw
+      that the Elector's favourite could be of use to him; and it is not your
+      adventurer's way to look too closely into the nature of the ladder by
+      which he has the chance to climb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so long as her
+      fondness for him might be useful, her hostility detrimental. But once the
+      Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was firmly in his grasp, and an intimate
+      friendship had ripened between himself and Prince Charles&mdash;the
+      Elector's younger son&mdash;sufficiently to ensure his future, he plucked
+      off the mask and allied himself with Sophia in her hostility towards
+      Madame von Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter, whilst on a
+      visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups a droll story
+      of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at Madame von Platen's
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But there was one
+      present who afterwards sent a report of it to the Countess, and you
+      conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused in her. Her rage was the
+      greater for being stifled. It was obviously impossible for her to appeal
+      to her lover, the Elector, to avenge her. From the Elector, above all
+      others, must the matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would
+      she forgo the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere all
+      was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer who had
+      flouted her be made to pay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more or less
+      directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite against Sophia.
+      This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into the arms of the Electoral
+      Prince. Melusina, who was years afterwards to be created Duchess of
+      Kendal, had not yet attained to that completeness of lank, bony
+      hideousness that was later to distinguish her in England. But even in
+      youth she could boast of little attraction. Prince George, however, was
+      easily attracted. A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to over-eating,
+      heavy drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina von Schulemberg
+      an ideal mate. Her installation as <i>maĂŽtresse en-titre</i> took place publicly
+      at a ball given by Prince George at Herrenhausen, a ball at which the
+      Princess Sophia was present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her dullard
+      husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her contempt of him now
+      left her, yet in the affront thus publicly offered her, she felt that the
+      limit of endurance had been reached. Next day it was found that she had
+      disappeared from Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at Zell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom and
+      levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the dignity of her
+      rank; recommended her to use in future greater prudence, and a proper,
+      wifely submission; and, the homily delivered, packed her back to her
+      husband at Herrenhausen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She had been
+      guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of respect for him.
+      She must learn what was due to her station, and to her husband. He would
+      thank her to instruct herself in these matters against his return from
+      Berlin, whither he was about to journey, and he warned her that he would
+      suffer no more tantrums of that kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby, frog-face
+      and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him, and
+      leaving hate and despair behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a true
+      friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to rescue her from
+      her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her elbow, against this
+      dreadful need, Destiny had placed her sometime playmate, her most devoted
+      friend&mdash;as she accounted him, and as, indeed, he was&mdash;the
+      elegant, reckless KĂśnigsmark, with his beautiful face, his golden mane,
+      and his unfathomable blue eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the formal
+      gardens of Herrenhausen&mdash;that palace as squat and ungraceful as those
+      who had built and who inhabited it&mdash;she opened her heart to him very
+      fully, allowed him, in her overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things
+      which for very shame she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept
+      nothing back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish husband,
+      told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she had
+      hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had beaten her
+      upon occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      KĂśnigsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of his
+      emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when she came at
+      last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is enough, madame,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I swear to you, as Heaven hears me,
+      that he shall be punished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Punished?&rdquo; she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him with a
+      smile of sad incredulity. &ldquo;It is not his punishment I seek, my friend, but
+      my own salvation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The one can be accomplished with the other,&rdquo; he answered hotly, and
+      struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. &ldquo;You shall be rid of this lout as
+      soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to Berlin to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell apart, as
+      she looked at him aghast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what would you do? What do you mean?&rdquo; she asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of you,
+      madame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. &ldquo;Princes do not fight,&rdquo; she said, on a note of
+      contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative&mdash;unless,
+      indeed, he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put an
+      affront on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have made him
+      valiant enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even that will not
+      answer, and he still shields himself behind his rank&mdash;why, there are
+      other ways to serve him.&rdquo; He was thinking, perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed the poor
+      lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy, and starved of
+      love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend, my friend!&rdquo; she cried, on a note that quivered and broke. &ldquo;You
+      are mad&mdash;wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What would become of
+      you if you did this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry gesture.
+      &ldquo;Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become of you. I was
+      born for your service, my princess, and the service being rendered...&rdquo; He
+      shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands and let them fall again to his
+      sides in an eloquent gesture. He was the complete courtier, the
+      knight-errant, the romantic <i>preux-chevalier</i> all in one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat in her
+      white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful face. If ever
+      she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss KĂśnigsmark in that
+      moment, but as she might have kissed a loving brother, in token of her
+      deep gratitude for his devotion to her who had known so little true
+      devotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you knew,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;what balsam this proof of your friendship has
+      poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would understand my utter lack of
+      words in which to thank you. You dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no
+      expression for my gratitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ask no gratitude,&rdquo; quoth he. &ldquo;I am all gratitude myself that you should
+      have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask your leave to serve
+      you in my own way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. &ldquo;Serve me if you
+      will&mdash;God knows I need the service of a loyal friend&mdash;but serve
+      me as I shall myself decide&mdash;no other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what alternative service can exist?&rdquo; he asked, almost impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place&mdash;to quit
+      Hanover, never to return.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to go whither?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this hateful
+      life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find shelter at Zell, as I
+      had hoped. Had it not been for the thought of my children, I should have
+      fled long ago. For the sake of those two little ones I have suffered
+      patiently through all these years. But the limit of endurance has been
+      reached and passed. Take me away. KĂśnigsmark!&rdquo; She was clutching his
+      lapels again. &ldquo;If you would really serve me, help me to escape.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his breast.
+      A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden kindling of the
+      eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones. These sensitive, romantic
+      natures are quickly stirred to passion, ever ready to yield to the
+      adventure of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My princess,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you may count upon your KĂśnigsmark while he has
+      life.&rdquo; Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still holding them, he
+      bowed low over them, so low that his heavy golden mane tumbled forward on
+      either side of his handsome head to form a screen under cover of which he
+      pressed his lips upon her fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough reward for
+      so much devotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you again,&rdquo; she breathed. &ldquo;And now I must think&mdash;I must
+      consider where I can count upon finding refuge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion was, no
+      doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of his horse, and so
+      ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom for her with his sword.
+      Her sober words dispelled the dream, revealed to him that it was not quite
+      intended he should hereafter be her custodian. And there for the moment
+      the matter was suspended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered that an
+      Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted interview,
+      accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-kissings, within
+      sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it happened, behind one of those
+      windows lurked the Countess von Platen, watching them jealously, and
+      without any disposition to construe the meeting innocently. Was she not
+      the deadly enemy of both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon her,
+      and had not KĂśnigsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and then
+      unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth of
+      profligates?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the Elector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your son is away in Prussia,&rdquo; quoth she. &ldquo;Who guards his honour in his
+      absence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;George's honour?&rdquo; quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
+      Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the notion of
+      guarding something whose existence was not easily discerned. He had no
+      sense of humour, as his appearance suggested. He was a short, fat man with
+      a face shaped like a pear&mdash;narrow in the brow and heavy in the jowl.
+      &ldquo;What the devil do you mean?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean that this foreign adventurer, KĂśnigsmark, and Sophia grow too
+      intimate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sophia!&rdquo; Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the line of his
+      ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent creases expressive of
+      contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That white-faced ninny! Bah!&rdquo; Her very virtue was matter for his scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly,&rdquo; replied the Countess,
+      out of her worldly wisdom. &ldquo;Listen a moment now.&rdquo; And she related, with
+      interest rather than discount, you may be sure, what she had witnessed
+      that afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia, and he
+      felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to Zell. Then, too,
+      being a libertine, and the father of a libertine, it logically followed
+      that unchastity in his women-folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heaved himself out of his deep chair. &ldquo;How far has this gone?&rdquo; he
+      demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that might
+      afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need, if she could
+      trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would presently afford her all
+      the evidence required to damn the pair. She said as much, and promised the
+      Elector that she would exercise herself the latter quality in his son's
+      service. Again the Elector did not find it grotesque that his mistress
+      should appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal&mdash;though
+      George's honour was the least thing that concerned her. What concerned her
+      was the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of KĂśnigsmark. So she watched
+      assiduously, and set others, too, to watch for her and to report. And
+      almost daily now she had for the Elector a tale of whisperings and
+      hand-pressings, and secret stolen meetings between the guilty twain. The
+      Elector enraged, and would have taken action, but that the guileful
+      Countess curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could not
+      be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the offenders, might
+      recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing the Duke of Zell to his
+      daughter's aid. So they must wait yet awhile until they held more absolute
+      proof of this intrigue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the Elector with
+      word that KĂśnigsmark and the Princess had shut themselves up together in
+      the garden pavilion. Let him come at once, and he should so discover them
+      for himself, and thus at last be able to take action. The Countess was
+      flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent&mdash;and Madame
+      von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had
+      seen, conceive it innocent&mdash;it was in an Electoral Princess an
+      unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none
+      would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried
+      off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late,
+      despite the diligence of his spy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been a brief
+      one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in all particulars.
+      She would seek a refuge at the court of her cousin, the Duke of
+      Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure&mdash;for the sake of what once had lain
+      between them&mdash;would not now refuse to shelter and protect her. Of
+      KĂśnigsmark she desired that he should act as her escort to her cousin's
+      court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      KĂśnigsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing that he
+      regretted. At Wolfenbuttel, having served Sophia faithfully, his
+      ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find expression. She would
+      make all dispositions, and advise him when she was ready to set out. But
+      they must use caution, for they were being spied upon. Madame von Platen's
+      over-eagerness had in part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their
+      consciousness of espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting in the
+      seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after Sophia had
+      left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his hands, his
+      eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when Ernest Augustus burst
+      furiously in, the Countess von Platen lingering just beyond the threshold.
+      The Elector's face was apoplectically purple from rage and haste, his
+      breath came in wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept round the chamber,
+      and fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled KĂśnigsmark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the Princess?&rdquo; he blurted out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had the scent
+      of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of innocent
+      mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance over his
+      shoulder at the Countess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was told that her Highness was here,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plainly,&rdquo; said KĂśnigsmark, with perfect calm, &ldquo;you have been
+      misinformed.&rdquo; And his quiet glance and gesture invited the Elector to look
+      round for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long have you been here yourself?&rdquo; Feeling at a disadvantage, the
+      Elector avoided the direct question that was in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half an hour at least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And in that time you have not seen the Princess?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seen the Princess?&rdquo; KĂśnigsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. &ldquo;I scarcely
+      understand your Highness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked down,
+      then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's glove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's this?&rdquo; quoth he. &ldquo;Whose glove is this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If KĂśnigsmark's heart missed a beat&mdash;as well it may have done&mdash;he
+      did not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me questions
+      that only a seer could answer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously suspicious
+      glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid, one of Sophia's
+      women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; the Elector snapped at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A glove her Highness lately dropped here,&rdquo; was the timid answer,
+      innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had been too
+      hastily dispatched to avert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil laughter
+      from him. When she had departed' he turned again to KĂśnigsmark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You fence skilfully,&rdquo; said he, sneering, &ldquo;too skilfully for an honest
+      man. Will you now tell me without any more of this, precisely what the
+      Princess Sophia was doing here with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      KĂśnigsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the furnace of
+      the Elector's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a prince is
+      not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady whose spotless purity
+      is beyond his understanding. But your Highness can hardly expect me to
+      become in never so slight a degree a party to that insult by vouchsafing
+      any answer to your question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is your last word, sir?&rdquo; The Elector shook with suppressed anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust forth in
+      scorn and menace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard, and as that
+      is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no reason why your sojourn
+      here should be protracted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      KĂśnigsmark bowed stiffly, formally. &ldquo;It shall end, your Highness, as soon
+      as I can make the necessary arrangements for my departure&mdash;in a week
+      at most.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are accorded three days, sir.&rdquo; The Elector turned, and waddled out,
+      leaving KĂśnigsmark to breathe freely again. The three days should suffice
+      for the Princess also. It was very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given this
+      troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and placed his
+      daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von Platen was the only
+      one concerned who thought that it was not well at all, the consummation
+      being far from that which she had desired. She had dreamt of a flaming
+      scandal, that should utterly consume her two enemies, Sophia and
+      KĂśnigsmark. Instead, she saw them both escaping, and the fact that she was&mdash;as
+      she may have supposed&mdash;effectively separating two loving hearts could
+      be no sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
+      Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more germane to her
+      desires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet confident that
+      at worst she could justify it, and little fearing that the worst would
+      happen, she boldly went to work. She forged next day a brief note in which
+      the Princess Sophia urgently bade KĂśnigsmark to come to her at ten o'clock
+      that night in her own apartments, and with threat and bribe induced the
+      waiting woman of the glove to bear that letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now it so happened that KĂśnigsmark, through the kind offices of Sophia's
+      maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in the secret of their
+      intentions, had sent the Princess a note that morning, briefly stating the
+      urgency of departure, and begging her so to arrange that she could leave
+      Herrenhausen with him on the morrow. He imagined the note now brought him
+      to be in answer to that appeal of his. Its genuineness he never doubted,
+      being unacquainted with Sophia's writing. He was aghast at the rashness
+      which dictated such an assignation, yet never hesitated as to keeping it.
+      It was not his way to hesitate. He trusted to the gods who watch over the
+      destinies of the bold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with having
+      dealt too softly with the Dane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bah!&rdquo; said the Elector. &ldquo;To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are rid of
+      him. Is not that enough?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already,&rdquo; quoth she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now what will you be hinting?&rdquo; he asked her peevishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this. KĂśnigsmark
+      has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this very night at ten o'clock&mdash;and
+      where do you suppose? In her Highness's own apartments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Elector came to his feet with an oath. &ldquo;That is not true!&rdquo; he cried.
+      &ldquo;It cannot be!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I'll say no more,&rdquo; quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it suffice you
+      that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing this profligate you
+      have sufficiently avenged the honour of your son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God, if I thought this were true....&rdquo; He choked with rage, stood
+      shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth is easily ascertained,&rdquo; said Madame. &ldquo;Conceal yourself in the
+      Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best go attended, for
+      it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been known aforetime to practice
+      murder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men together,
+      KĂśnigsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's antechamber, whilst
+      Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her Highness of his visit. Sophia had
+      already retired to bed, and the amazing announcement of the Count's
+      presence there startled her into a fear of untoward happenings. She was
+      overwhelmed, too, by the rashness of this step of his, coming after the
+      events of yesterday. If it should be known that he had visited her thus,
+      terrible consequences might ensue. She rose, and with Mademoiselle de
+      Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive him. Yet for all that she made
+      haste, the precious irreclaimable moments sped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
+      propriety's sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; she asked him breathlessly. &ldquo;What brings you here at such an
+      hour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What brings me?&rdquo; quoth he, surprised at that reception. &ldquo;Why, your
+      commands&mdash;your letter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My letter? What letter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He plucked forth
+      the treacherous note, and proffered it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, what does this mean?&rdquo; She swept a white hand over her eyes and
+      brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her vision. &ldquo;That is
+      not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream I should be imprudent as
+      to bid you hither, and at such an hour How could you dream it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm, perhaps
+      in sheer bitter mirth. &ldquo;It will be, no doubt, the work of our friend,
+      Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest, my travelling chaise
+      will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow by the Markt Kirck in Hanover,
+      and I shall wait within it. I shall hope to conduct you safely to
+      Wolfenbuttel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will come, I will come. But go now&mdash;oh, go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked very deeply into her eyes&mdash;a valedictory glance against the
+      worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and kissed it,
+      and so departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of stairs, and
+      pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He passed through, and
+      thrust the door behind him, then stood a moment looking round the vast
+      apartment. If he was too late to avoid the springs of the baited trap, it
+      was here that they should snap upon him. Yet all was still. A single lamp
+      on a table in the middle of the vast chamber shed a feeble, flickering
+      light, yet sufficient to assure him that no one waited here. He sighed
+      relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set out swiftly to cross the
+      hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the tall
+      stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged his
+      sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the man who for
+      ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to depend upon his blade.
+      That swift action sealed his doom. Their orders were to take him living or
+      dead, and standing in awe of his repute, they were not the men to incur
+      risks. Even as he came on guard, a partisan grazed his head, and another
+      opened his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright golden hair,
+      and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat, yet his right hand still
+      desperately clutching his useless sword.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike again,
+      and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he suddenly beheld
+      the Countess von Platen materializing out of the surrounding shadows as it
+      seemed, and behind her the squat, ungraceful figure of the Elector. He
+      fought for breath. &ldquo;I am slain,&rdquo; he gasped, &ldquo;and as I am to appear before
+      my Maker I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is innocent. Spare her at
+      least, your Highness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Innocent!&rdquo; said the Elector hoarsely. &ldquo;Then what did you now in her
+      apartments?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the lips of the
+      dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the halberts finished him
+      off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the floor of the
+      Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen, which was long
+      to remain imbrued with his blood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus miserably perished the glittering KĂśnigsmark, a martyr to his own
+      irrepressible romanticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his fate
+      that night. She was placed under arrest next morning, and Prince George
+      was summoned back from Berlin at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not suffered, for
+      he was disposed to let the matter drop, content that they should remain in
+      the forbidding relations which had existed between them before this
+      happening. But Sophia was uncompromising in her demand for strict justice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you,&rdquo; she told him. &ldquo;If innocent, you
+      are unworthy of me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to divorce
+      them. But since with the best intentions there was no faintest evidence of
+      her adultery, this court had to be content to pronounce the divorce upon
+      the ground of her desertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in vain. She
+      was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on the Ahlen, to drag
+      out in that melancholy duress another thirty-two years of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that on her
+      death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to her sometime
+      husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months later, as King George
+      was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that letter was placed in his
+      carriage as it crossed the frontier into Germany. It contained Sophia's
+      dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn summons to King George to
+      stand by her side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a year, and
+      there make answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her
+      blighted life and her miserable death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading of that
+      letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died in his carriage
+      next day&mdash;the 9th of June, 1727&mdash;on the road to Osnabruck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her lover in the
+      sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word&mdash;for he never so much
+      as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of his existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld her in the
+      tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting corollary to her action.
+      She in her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil martyrdom
+      upon the altar of Republicanism and his exultant martyrdom upon the altar
+      of Love were alike splendidly futile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It has its
+      pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no might-have-been
+      which death had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her; because he loved
+      her, he died. That is all, but for the details which I am now to give you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter of a
+      landless squire of Normandy, a member of the <i>chĂŠtive noblesse</i>, a man of
+      gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him against
+      the law of entail or primogeniture&mdash;the prime cause of the inequality
+      out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted France. Like
+      many of his order and condition he was among the earliest converts to
+      Republicanism&mdash;the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding
+      constitutional government of the people by the people, holding monarchical
+      and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican doctrines to
+      which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she rejoiced when the hour
+      of awakening sounded and the children of France rose up and snapped the
+      fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries by an insolent
+      minority of their fellow-countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a transient
+      phase&mdash;horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion of that
+      awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government of her
+      dreams would follow&mdash;must follow, since among the people's elected
+      representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of her
+      father's class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by a lofty
+      altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party presently to
+      be known as the Girondins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least another.
+      And this other in the National Assembly was that of the Jacobins, less
+      pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party in which stood
+      pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as Robespierre, Danton,&mdash;and
+      Marat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for
+      Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned Marat
+      and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and thereby
+      precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat was the
+      prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of twenty-nine
+      deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled into the country,
+      hoping to raise an army that should yet save France, and several of the
+      fugitives made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and oratory they
+      laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were gifted, able men,
+      eloquent speakers and skilled writers, and they might have succeeded but
+      that in Paris sat another man no less gifted, and with surer knowledge of
+      the temper of the proletariat, tirelessly wielding a vitriolic pen,
+      skilled in the art of inflaming the passions of the mob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime
+      professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of St.
+      Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works, inveterate
+      pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and editor of L'Ami
+      du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had bestowed upon him the
+      name borne by his gazette, so that he was known as The People's Friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian
+      Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured,
+      their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his
+      vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de MĂŠdecine in Paris he spun with his
+      clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and
+      threatened finally to choke them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in which
+      Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins he
+      appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of the
+      three, whilst to Charlotte Corday&mdash;the friend and associate now of
+      the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen&mdash;he loomed so
+      vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young
+      mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached by
+      the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening to
+      corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and to
+      replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
+      still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to raise an army
+      with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches of the Jacobins. An
+      anguished spectator of this failure, she saw in it a sign that Liberty was
+      being strangled at its birth. On the lips of her friends the Girondins she
+      caught again the name of Marat, the murderer of Liberty; and, brooding,
+      she reached a conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter which she wrote
+      about that time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the friends of
+      law and humanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent it was
+      but a step. That step she took. She may have considered awhile the
+      proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have come to her with
+      realization. She understood that a great sacrifice was necessary; that who
+      undertook to rid France of that unclean monster must go prepared for
+      self-immolation. She counted the cost calmly and soberly&mdash;for calm
+      and sober was now her every act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach from
+      Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had written:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be possible
+      for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in France. On leaving I
+      post this letter to you. When you receive it I shall no longer be here.
+      Heaven denied us the happiness of living together, as it has denied us
+      other happinesses. May it show itself more clement to our country.
+      Good-by, dear Father. Embrace my sister for me, and do not forget me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to
+      save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should
+      remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the
+      Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold
+      Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he
+      corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the
+      monster's death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at the
+      hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified, she
+      trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great
+      tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
+      of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of this maid
+      of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris diligence on
+      that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic&mdash;1793, old style. She
+      was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded across her
+      well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown hair. She was
+      of a good height and finely proportioned, and her carriage as full of
+      dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness that a
+      contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was gray-eyed,
+      and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face squaring a little
+      at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her habit, calm her
+      slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and calm the mind
+      reflected in all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the open country
+      and the Paris road, not even the thought of the errand upon which she
+      goes, of her death-dealing and death-receiving mission, can shake that
+      normal calm. Here is no wild exaltation, no hysterical obedience to
+      hotly-conceived impulse. Here is purpose, as cold as it is lofty, to
+      liberate France and pay with her life for the privilege of doing so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared her ineptly
+      with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan moved with pomp in a
+      gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations, sustained by the heady wine of
+      combat and of enthusiasm openly indulged, towards a goal of triumph.
+      Charlotte travelled quietly in the stuffy diligence with the quiet
+      conviction that her days were numbered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one among
+      them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous attentions, and
+      actually proposed marriage to her before the coach had rolled over the
+      bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux Augustine, where
+      she engaged a room on the first floor, and then she set out in quest of
+      the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of introduction to him from the
+      Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she had been on friendly terms at Caen.
+      Duperret was to assist her to obtain an interview with the Minister of the
+      Interior. She had undertaken to see the latter on the subject of certain
+      papers relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an old convent friend of
+      her own, and she was in haste to discharge this errand, so as to be free
+      for the great task upon which she was come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was ill, and
+      confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change of plans, and the
+      relinquishing of her project of affording him a spectacular death in the
+      crowded hall of the Convention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the business of
+      her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose early, and by six o'clock
+      she was walking in the cool gardens of the Palais Royal, considering with
+      that almost unnatural calm of hers the ways and means of accomplishing her
+      purpose in the unexpected conditions that she found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards eight o'clock, when Paris was awakening to the business of the day
+      and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler's shop in the Palais
+      Royal, and bought for two francs a stout kitchen knife in a shagreen case.
+      She then returned to her hotel to breakfast, and afterwards, dressed in
+      her brown travelling-gown and conical hat, she went forth again, and,
+      hailing a hackney carriage, drove to Marat's house in the Rue de l'Ecole de
+      MĂŠdecine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The Citizen Marat
+      was ill, she was told, and could receive no visitors. It was Simonne
+      Everard, the triumvir's mistress&mdash;later to be known as the Widow
+      Marat&mdash;who barred her ingress with this message.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter to the
+      triumvir:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Citizen,&mdash;I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country leads
+      me to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the unfortunate events
+      which are taking place in that part of the Republic. I shall therefore
+      call upon you towards one o'clock. Have the kindness to receive me, and
+      accord me a moment's audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering a
+      great service to France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marie Corday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late afternoon
+      waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of receiving any, she
+      wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter? May I
+      hope for a moment's audience? If you have received my letter, I hope you
+      will not refuse me, considering the importance of the matter. It should
+      suffice for you that I am very unfortunate to give me the right to your
+      protection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown&mdash;you observe this
+      further manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no departure
+      from the ordinary habits of life&mdash;she goes forth to deliver in person
+      this second letter, the knife concealed in the folds of the muslin fichu
+      crossed high upon her breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room of that
+      house in the Rue de l'Ecole de MĂŠdecine, the People's Friend is seated in
+      a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he is obeying, for in all France
+      there is no man more filthy in his person and his habits than this
+      triumvir. His bath is medicated. The horrible, loathsome disease that
+      corrodes his flesh demands these long immersions to quiet the gnawing
+      pains which distract his active, restless mind. In these baths he can
+      benumb the torment of the body with which he is encumbered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more&mdash;leastways, nothing more
+      that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs he
+      has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of
+      personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient
+      sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at irregular
+      intervals, all have their source in his contempt for the physical part of
+      him. This talented man of varied attainments, accomplished linguist,
+      skilled physician, able naturalist and profound psychologist, lives in his
+      intellect alone, impatient of all physical interruptions. If he consents
+      to these immersions, if he spends whole days seated in this medicated
+      bath, it is solely because it quenches or cools the fires that are
+      devouring him, and thus permits him to bend his mind to the work that is
+      his life. But his long-suffering body is avenging upon the mind the
+      neglect to which it has been submitted. The morbid condition of the former
+      is being communicated to the latter, whence results that disconcerting
+      admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and exalted sensibility which marked
+      his nature in the closing years of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his bath, then, sat the People's Friend on that July evening, immersed
+      to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his emaciated body cased
+      in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years of age, dying of consumption
+      and other things, so that, did Charlotte but know it, there is no need to
+      murder him. Disease and Death have marked him for their own, and grow
+      impatient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty wooden
+      box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of paper, and two or
+      three copies of L'Ami do Peuple. There was no sound in the room but the
+      scratch and splutter of his quill. He was writing diligently, revising and
+      editing a proof of the forthcoming issue of his paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in which he
+      was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption, until it disturbed
+      and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his bath, listened a moment,
+      then, with intent to make an end of the interruption, he raised a hoarse,
+      croaking voice to inquire what might be taking place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge, entered
+      the room. She was fully twenty years younger than himself, and under the
+      slattern appearance which life in that house had imposed upon her there
+      were vestiges of a certain comeliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently to see you
+      upon a matter of national importance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in that
+      leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old foes of his,
+      the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She says,&rdquo; Simonne continued, &ldquo;that she wrote a letter to you this
+      morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have told her that
+      you will not receive anyone, and...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me the note,&rdquo; he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust out an
+      unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne's hand. He spread it,
+      and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his eyes narrowing to slits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let her in,&rdquo; he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him without more
+      ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone together&mdash;the
+      avenger and her victim. For a moment each regarded the other. Marat beheld
+      a handsome young woman, elegantly attired. But these things had no
+      interest for the People's Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of
+      beauty? Charlotte beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and was
+      full satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
+      confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Marat spoke. &ldquo;So you are from Caen, child?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And what is
+      doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She approached him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rebellion, ha!&rdquo; It was a sound between a laugh and a croak. &ldquo;Tell me what
+      deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their names.&rdquo; He took up and
+      dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him, erect and
+      calm. She recited the names of her friends, the Girondins, whilst hunched
+      there in his bath his pen scratched briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So many for the guillotine,&rdquo; he snarled, when it was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her fichu, and as
+      he uttered those words of doom to others his own doom descended upon him
+      in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by that strong young arm, the long,
+      stout blade was buried to its black hilt in his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as he sank
+      back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Help, chĂŠre amie! Help!&rdquo; he cried, and was for ever silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the bath at
+      the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank sideways in the same
+      direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon his right shoulder, whilst
+      from the great rent in his breast the blood gushed forth, embruing the
+      water of his bath, trickling to the brick-paved floor, bespattering&mdash;symbolically
+      almost&mdash;a copy of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal to which he had
+      devoted so much of his uneasy life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance sufficed
+      to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a tigress, she sprang upon
+      the unresisting slayer, seizing her by the head, and calling loudly the
+      while for assistance. Came instantly from the anteroom Jeanne, the old
+      cook, the Fortress of the house, and Laurent Basse, a folder of Marat's
+      paper; and now Charlotte found herself confronted by four maddened,
+      vociferous beings, at whose hands she may well have expected to receive
+      the death for which she was prepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of it
+      across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his fury to have
+      battered her to death, but for the arrival of <i>gens d'armes</i> and the police
+      commissioner of the district, who took her in their protecting charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became known. All
+      night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the revolutionary
+      rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch upon the house wherein
+      the People's Friend lay dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte Corday lay
+      in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude the indignities
+      that for a woman were almost inseparable from revolutionary incarceration.
+      She preserved throughout her imperturbable calm, based now upon a state of
+      mind content in the contemplation of accomplished purpose, duty done. She
+      had saved France, she believed; saved Liberty, by slaying the man who
+      would have strangled it. In that illusion she was content. Her own life
+      was a small price to pay for the splendid achievement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her friends,
+      in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she had done,
+      expounding fully the motives that had impelled her, dwelling upon the
+      details of the execution, and of all that had followed. Among the letters
+      written by her during those &ldquo;days of the preparation of peace &ldquo;&mdash;as
+      she calls that period, dating in such terms a long epistle to Barbaroux&mdash;was
+      one to the Committee of Public Safety, in which she begs that a
+      miniature-painter may be sent to her to paint her portrait, so that she
+      may leave this token of remembrance to her friends. It is only in this, as
+      the end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought for her own
+      self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a instrument in the
+      hands of Fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began before the
+      Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall as she appeared in
+      her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and calm&mdash;always calm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of the
+      cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to examine her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the object of your visit to Paris?&rdquo; he asks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To kill Marat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What motives induced you to this horrible deed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His many crimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of what crimes do you accuse him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive the
+      fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator; that he sought
+      to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by causing the arrest and
+      imprisonment of the deputies to the Convention on May 31st.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What proof have you of this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a mask of
+      patriotism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have none.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Montane shook his head. &ldquo;You cannot convince anyone that a person of your
+      age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless instigated by some
+      person or persons whom you are unwilling to name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Charlotte almost smiled. &ldquo;That shows but a poor knowledge of the human
+      heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the strength of one's
+      own hatred than upon that of others.&rdquo; And then, raising her voice, she
+      proclaimed: &ldquo;I killed one man to save a hundred thousand; I killed a
+      villain to save innocents; I killed a savage wild-beast to give repose to
+      France. I was a Republican before the Revolution. I never lacked for
+      energy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established. Her
+      fearless self-obssession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-Tinville, the
+      dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her so virginal and fair and
+      brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal had not had the best of it, he
+      sought with a handful of revolutionary filth to restore the balance. He
+      rose slowly, his ferrety eyes upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many children have you had?&rdquo; he rasped, sardonic, his tone a slur, an
+      insult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed, disdainful, as
+      she answered coldly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have I not stated that I am not married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the impression he
+      sought to convey, and he sat down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed to defend
+      her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had been intimidated. He
+      had received a note from the jury ordering him to remain silent, another
+      from the President bidding him declare her mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable; it
+      satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his client. It uttered
+      the whole truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The prisoner,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;confesses with calm the horrible crime she has
+      committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she confesses its
+      most dreadful details; in short, she confesses everything, and does not
+      seek to justify herself. That, citizens of the jury, is her whole defence.
+      This imperturbable calm, this utter abnegation of self, which displays no
+      remorse even in the very presence of death, are contrary to nature. They
+      can only be explained by the excitement of political fanaticism which
+      armed her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to judge what weight
+      that moral consideration should have in the scales of justice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full sentence
+      of the law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber of
+      the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but she dismissed
+      him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations. She preferred the
+      painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to
+      paint her portrait in accordance with her request. And during the sitting,
+      which lasted half an hour, she conversed with him quietly on ordinary
+      topics, the tranquillity of her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death
+      that was so swiftly approaching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He carried
+      the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination. She showed no
+      dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that the time spent with
+      Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged for a few moments in which
+      to write a note, and, the request being granted, acquitted herself briskly
+      of that task, then announcing herself ready, she removed her cap that
+      Sanson might cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking his scissors, she
+      herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for remembrance. When Sanson
+      would have bound her hands, she begged that she might be allowed to wear
+      gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by the cord with which she had
+      been pinioned in Marat's house. He answered that she might do so if she
+      wished, but that it was unnecessary, as he could bind her without causing
+      pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;those others had not your experience,&rdquo; and she
+      proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further demur. &ldquo;If this
+      toilet of death is performed by rude hands,&rdquo; she commented, &ldquo;at least it
+      leads to immortality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and, disdaining the
+      chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to show herself dauntless
+      to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce was that rage, indeed. So
+      densely thronged were the streets that the tumbril proceeded at a crawl,
+      and the people surging about the cart screamed death and insult at the
+      doomed woman. It took two hours to reach the Place de la RĂŠvolution, and
+      meanwhile a terrific summer thunderstorm had broken over Paris, and a
+      torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed streets. Charlotte's
+      garments were soaked through and through, so that her red smock, becoming
+      glued now to her body and fitting her like a skin, threw into relief its
+      sculptural beauty, whilst a reflection of the vivid crimson of the garment
+      faintly tinged her cheeks, and thus heightened her appearance of complete
+      composure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is now in the Rue St. HonorĂŠ that at long last we reach the opening
+      of our tragic love-story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux&mdash;sent to Paris by the
+      city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention&mdash;was
+      standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an accomplished,
+      learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy and of medicine,
+      although in the latter capacity he had never practiced owing to an extreme
+      sensibility of nature, which rendered anatomical work repugnant to him. He
+      was a man of a rather exalted imagination, unhappily married&mdash;the not
+      uncommon fate of such delicate temperaments&mdash;and now living apart
+      from his wife. He had heard, as all Paris had heard, every detail of the
+      affair, and of the trial, and he waited there, curious to see this woman,
+      with whose deed he was secretly in sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled up
+      around him, and at last he beheld her&mdash;beautiful, serene, full of
+      life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed upon her,
+      standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of those about him, he
+      bared his head, and thus silently saluted and paid homage to her. She did
+      not see him. He had not thought that she would. He saluted her as the
+      devout salute the unresponsive image of a saint. The tumbril crawled on.
+      He turned his head, and followed her with his eyes for awhile; then,
+      driving his elbows into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a
+      passage through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
+      gaze, a man entranced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he had
+      seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in the hush
+      that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice suddenly rang
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is greater than Brutus!&rdquo; was his cry; and he added, addressing those
+      who stared at him in stupefaction: &ldquo;It were beautiful to have died with
+      her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that
+      moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's attendant,
+      who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped the cheek with his
+      hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow.
+      Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof
+      that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded with
+      copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of Republicanism, the
+      deliverer of France, in which occurs the comparison with Joan of Arc, that
+      other great heroine of France. This was the work of Adam Lux. He made no
+      secret of it. The vision of her had so wrought upon the imagination of
+      this susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such enthusiasm, that
+      he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in expressing the
+      phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last moments of life she had
+      inspired him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he urged
+      the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her act, placed
+      her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately demanded for her the
+      honour and veneration of posterity. It is in this manifesto that he
+      applies euphemistically to her deed the term &ldquo;tyrannicide.&rdquo; That document
+      he boldly signed with his own name, realizing that he would pay for that
+      temerity with his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was arrested on the 24th of July&mdash;exactly a week from the day on
+      which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they exerted
+      themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and release if he would
+      publicly retract what he had written. But he laughed the proposal to
+      scorn, ardently resolved to follow into death the woman who had aroused
+      the hopeless, immaterial love that made his present torment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor named
+      Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that the sight of
+      Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a paper on this plea,
+      recommending that clemency be shown to the young doctor on the score of
+      his affliction, and that he should be sent to a hospital or to America.
+      Adam Lux was angry when he heard of this, and protested indignantly
+      against the allegations of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la
+      Montagne, which published his declaration on the 26th of September, to the
+      effect that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his anxiety
+      to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his sanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of October, when
+      at last he was brought to trial. He stood it joyously, in a mood of
+      exultation at his approaching deliverance. He assured the court that he
+      did not fear the guillotine, and that all ignominy had been removed from
+      such a death by the pure blood of Charlotte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, sublime Charlotte,&rdquo; he exclaimed, &ldquo;if I should find it
+      impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness that were
+      yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right that the adored should
+      be above the adorer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers had been a
+      mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic exaltation. At five o'clock
+      that same afternoon he stepped from the tumbril under the gaunt shadow of
+      the guillotine. He turned to the people, his eyes bright, a flush on his
+      cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte,&rdquo; he told them,
+      and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the bridegroom on his way
+      to the nuptial altar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment,
+Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/7949.txt b/old/7949.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7949.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment,
+Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+
+Author: Rafael Sabatini
+
+Release Date: March 5, 2009 [EBook #7949]
+Last Updated: August 25, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by J. C. Byers, and Abdulh Ameed Alhassan
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES
+
+
+By Rafael Sabatini
+
+
+
+
+
+To David Whitelaw
+
+My Dear David,
+
+Since the narratives collected here as well as in the preceding volume
+under the title of the Historical Nights Entertainment--narratives
+originally published in The Premier Magazine, which you so ably
+edit--owe their being to your suggestion, it is fitting that some
+acknowledgment of the fact should be made. To what is hardly less than
+a duty, allow me to add the pleasure of dedicating to you, in earnest of
+my friendship and esteem, not merely this volume, but the work of which
+this volume is the second.
+
+Sincerely yours,
+
+Rafael Sabatini
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+ Preface
+
+        I.   THE ABSOLUTION
+   II.   THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+   III.   THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+   IV.   THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+   V.   THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+   VI.   THE BARREN WOOING
+   VII.   SIR JUDAS
+   VIII.       HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+   IX.   THE PATH OF EXILE
+   X.   THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+   XI.   THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the Historical
+Nights Entertainment, issued in December of 1917, has encouraged me to
+prepare the second series here assembled.
+
+As in the case of the narratives that made up the first volume, I set
+out again with the same ambitious aim of adhering scrupulously in every
+instance to actual, recorded facts; and once again I find it desirable
+at the outset to reveal how far the achievement may have fallen short of
+the admitted aim.
+
+On the whole, I have to confess to having allowed myself perhaps a wider
+latitude, and to having taken greater liberties than was the case with
+the essays constituting the previous collection. This, however, applies,
+where applicable, to the parts rather than to the whole.
+
+The only entirely apocryphal narrative here included is the first--"The
+Absolution." This is one of those stories which, if resting upon no
+sufficient authority to compel its acceptance, will, nevertheless,
+resist all attempts at final refutation, having its roots at least
+in the soil of fact. It is given in the rather discredited Portuguese
+chronicles of Acenheiro, and finds place, more or less as related here,
+in Duarte Galvao's "Chronicle of Affonso Henriques," whence it was taken
+by the Portuguese historical writer, Alexandre Herculano, to be included
+in his "Lendas e Narrativas." If it is to be relegated to the Limbo of
+the ben trovato, at least I esteem it to afford us a precious glimpse
+of the naive spirit of the age in which it is set, and find in that my
+justification for including it.
+
+The next to require apology is "His Insolence of Buckingham," but
+only in so far as the incident of the diamond studs is concerned. The
+remainder of the narrative, the character of Buckingham, the details of
+his embassy to Paris, and the particulars of his audacious courtship of
+Anne of Austria, rest upon unassailable evidence. I would have omitted
+the very apocryphal incident of the studs, but that I considered it of
+peculiar interest as revealing the source of the main theme of one
+of the most famous historical romances ever written--"The Three
+Musketeers." I give the story as related by La Rochefoucauld in his
+"Memoirs," whence Alexandre Dumas culled it that he might turn it to
+such excellent romantic account. In La Rochefoucauld's narrative it is
+the painter Gerbier who, in a far less heroic manner, plays the part
+assigned by Dumas to d'Artagnan, and it is the Countess of Carlisle who
+carries out the political theft which Dumas attributes to Milady. For
+the rest, I do not invite you to attach undue credit to it, which is
+not, however, to say that I account it wholly false.
+
+In the case of "The Hermosa Fembra" I confess to having blended together
+into one single narrative two historical episodes closely connected in
+time and place. Susan's daughter was, in fact, herself the betrayer
+of her father, and it was in penitence for that unnatural act that
+she desired her skull to be exhibited as I describe. Into the story of
+Susan's daughter I have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who,
+like the Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover--in this case a
+youth of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment
+in circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the
+judaizing of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore word of it
+at once to Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in fact by an interval
+of three years, and the first afforded Ojeda a strong argument for the
+institution of the Holy Office in Seville. Between the two there are
+many points of contact, and each supplies what the other lacks to make
+an interesting narrative having for background the introduction of the
+Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely fictitious,
+and the introduction of Torquemada is quite arbitrary. Ojeda was the
+inquisitor who dealt with both cases. But if there I stray into fiction,
+at least I claim to have sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand
+Inquisitor as I know him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life
+and times.
+
+The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point of view
+of my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a historical
+mystery. The mystery lies, of course, in the man's identity. He has
+been held by some to have been the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otropiev, by
+others to have been a son of Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. I am not
+aware that the theory that he was both at one and the same time has ever
+been put forward, and whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I
+claim that no other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of
+his career or to shed light upon its mysteries.
+
+Undoubtedly I have allowed myself a good deal of licence and speculation
+in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The Barren Wooing." But
+the theory that I develop in it to account for the miscarriage of the
+matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley seems to me to
+be not only very fully warranted by de Quadra's correspondence, but the
+only theory that will convincingly explain the events. Elizabeth, as
+I show, was widely believed to be an accessory to the murder of Amy
+Robsart. But in carefully following her words and actions at that
+critical time, as reported by de Quadra, my reading of the transaction
+is as given here. The most damning fact against Elizabeth was held to be
+her own statement to de Quadra on the eve of Lady Robert Dudley's murder
+to the effect that Lady Robert was "already dead, or very nearly
+so." This foreknowledge of the fate of that unfortunate lady has been
+accepted as positive evidence that the Queen was a party to the crime at
+Cumnor, which was to set her lover free to marry again. Far from that,
+however, I account it positive proof of Elizabeth's innocence of any
+such part in the deed. Elizabeth was far too crafty and clear-sighted
+not to realize how her words must incriminate her afterwards if she knew
+that the murder of Lady Robert was projected. She must have been merely
+repeating what Dudley himself had told her; and what he must have told
+her--and she believed--was that his wife was at the point of a natural
+death. Similarly, Dudley would not have told her this, unless his aim
+had been to procure his wife's removal by means which would admit of
+a natural interpretation. Difficulties encountered, much as I relate
+them--and for which there is abundant evidence--drove his too-zealous
+agents to rather desperate lengths, and thus brought suspicion, not only
+upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent Queen. The manner
+of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be far from what
+actually took place. The possibility of an accident--extraordinarily and
+suspiciously opportune for Dudley as it would have been--could not be
+altogether ruled out but for the further circumstance that Lady
+Robert had removed everybody from Cumnor on that day. To what can
+this point--unless we accept an altogether incredible chain of
+coincidence--but to some such plotting as I here suggest?
+
+In the remaining six essays in this volume the liberties taken with the
+absolute facts are so slight as to require no apology or comment.
+
+R. S.
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Detailed Contents
+
+
+  I. THE ABSOLUTION
+       Affonso Henriques, First King of Portugal
+  II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+       Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+  III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+       An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+  IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+       The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+  V. THE END OF THE VERT GALANT
+       The Assassination of Henry IV
+  VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+       The Murder of Amy Robsart
+  VII. SIR JUDAS
+       The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+  VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+       George Villiers' Courtship of Anne of Austria
+  IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+       The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+  X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+       Count Philip Koenigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+  XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+       Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+
+Aftonso Henriques, first King of Portugal
+
+In 1093 the Moors of the Almoravide dynasty, under the Caliph Yusuf,
+swept irresistibly upwards into the Iberian Peninsula, recapturing
+Lisbon and Santarem in the west, and pushing their conquest as far as
+the river Mondego.
+
+To meet this revival of Mohammedan power, Alfonso VI. Of Castile
+summoned the chivalry of Christendom to his aid. Among the knights who
+answered the call was Count Henry of Burgundy (grandson of Robert, first
+Duke of Burgundy) to whom Alfonso gave his natural daughter Theresa in
+marriage, together with the Counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the
+title of Count of Portugal.
+
+That is the first chapter of the history of Portugal.
+
+Count Henry fought hard to defend his southern frontiers from the
+incursion of the Moors until his death in 1114. Thereafter his widow
+Theresa became Regent of Portugal during the minority of their son,
+Affonso Henriques. A woman of great energy, resource and ambition, she
+successfully waged war against the Moors, and in other ways laid the
+foundations upon which her son was to build the Kingdom of Portugal. But
+her passionate infatuation for one of her knights--Don Fernando Peres de
+Trava--and the excessive honours she bestowed upon him, made enemies for
+her in the new state, and estranged her from her son.
+
+In 1127 Alfonso VII. of Castile invaded Portugal, compelling Theresa
+to recognize him as her suzerain. But Affonso Henriques, now aged
+seventeen--and declared by the citizens of the capital to be of age and
+competent to reign--incontinently refused to recognize the submission
+made by his mother, and in the following year assembled an army for the
+purpose of expelling her and her lover from the country. The warlike
+Theresa resisted until defeated in the battle of San Mamede and taken
+prisoner.
+
+He was little more than a boy, although four years were sped already
+since, as a mere lad of fourteen, he had kept vigil throughout the night
+over his arms in the Cathedral of Zamora, preparatory to receiving
+the honour of knighthood at the hands of his cousin, Alfonso VII. of
+Castile. Yet already he was looked upon as the very pattern of what a
+Christian knight should be, worthy son of the father who had devoted his
+life to doing battle against the Infidel, wheresoever he might be found.
+He was well-grown and tall, and of a bodily strength that is almost a
+byword to this day in that Portugal of which he was the real founder
+and first king. He was skilled beyond the common wont in all knightly
+exercises of arms and horsemanship, and equipped with far more
+learning--though much of it was ill-digested, as this story will serve
+to show--than the twelfth century considered useful or even proper in
+a knight. And he was at least true to his time in that he combined a
+fervid piety with a weakness of the flesh and an impetuous arrogance
+that was to bring him under the ban of greater excommunication at the
+very outset of his reign.
+
+It happened that his imprisonment of his mother was not at all pleasing
+in the sight of Rome. Dona Theresa had powerful friends, who so
+used their influence at the Vatican on her behalf that the Holy
+Father--conveniently ignoring the provocation she had given and the
+scandalous, unmotherly conduct of which she had been guilty--came to
+consider the behaviour of the Infante of Portugal as reprehensibly
+unfilial, and commanded him to deliver Dona Theresa at once from duress.
+
+This Papal order, backed by a threat of excommunication in the event of
+disobedience, was brought to the young prince by the Bishop of Coimbra,
+whom he counted among his friends.
+
+Affonso Henriques, ever impetuous and quick to anger, flushed scarlet
+when he heard that uncompromising message. His dark eyes smouldered as
+they considered the aged prelate.
+
+"You come here to bid me let loose again upon this land of Portugal that
+author of strife, to deliver over the people once more to the oppression
+of the Lord of Trava?" he asked. "And you tell me that unless by obeying
+this command I am false to the duty I owe this country, you will launch
+the curse of Rome against me? You tell me this?"
+
+The bishop, deeply stirred, torn between his duty to the Holy See and
+his affection for his prince, bowed his head and wrung his hands. "What
+choice have I?" he asked, on a quavering note.
+
+"I raised you from the dust." Thunder was rumbling in the prince's
+voice. "Myself I placed the episcopal ring upon your finger."
+
+"My lord, my lord! Could I forget? All that I have I owe to you--save
+only my soul, which I owe to God; my faith, which I owe to Christ; and
+my obedience, which I owe to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+The prince considered him in silence, mastering his passionate,
+impetuous nature. "Go," he growled at last.
+
+The prelate bowed his head, his eyes not daring to meet his prince's.
+
+"God keep you, lord," he almost sobbed, and so went out.
+
+But though stirred by his affection for the prince to whom he owed so
+much, though knowing in his inmost heart that Affonso Henriques was in
+the right, the Bishop of Coimbra did not swerve from his duty to Rome,
+which was as plain as it was unpalatable. Betimes next morning word was
+brought to Affonso Henriques in the Alcazar of Coimbra that a
+parchment was nailed to the door of the Cathedral, setting forth his
+excommunication, and that the Bishop--either out of fear or out of
+sorrow--had left the city, journeying northward towards Oporto.
+
+Affonso Henriques passed swiftly from incredulity to anger; then almost
+as swiftly came to a resolve, which was as mad and harebrained as could
+have been expected from a lad in his eighteenth year who held the reins
+of power. Yet by its very directness and its superb ignoring of all
+obstacles, legal and canonical, it was invested with a certain wild
+sanity.
+
+In full armour, a white cloak simply embroidered in gold at the edge
+and knotted at the shoulder, he rode to the Cathedral, attended by his
+half-brother Pedro Affonso, and two of his knights, Emigio Moniz and
+Sancho Nunes. There on the great iron-studded doors he found, as he had
+been warned, the Roman parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous
+Latin periods set forth in a fine round clerkly hand.
+
+He swung down from his great horse and clanked up the Cathedral steps,
+his attendants following. He had for witnesses no more than a few
+loiterers, who had paused at sight of their prince.
+
+The interdict had so far attracted no attention, for in the twelfth
+century the art of letters was a mystery to which there were few
+initiates.
+
+Affonso Henriques tore the sheepskin from its nails, and crumpled it
+in his hand; then he passed into the Cathedral, and thence came out
+presently into the cloisters. Overhead a bell was clanging by his
+orders, summoning the chapter.
+
+To the Infante, waiting there in the sun-drenched close, came presently
+the canons, austere, aloof, majestic in their unhurried progress through
+the fretted cloisters, with flowing garments and hands tucked into
+their wide sleeves before them. In a semi-circle they arrayed themselves
+before him, and waited impassively to learn his will. Overhead the bell
+had ceased.
+
+Affonso Henriques wasted no words.
+
+"I have summoned you," he announced, "to command that you proceed to the
+election of a bishop."
+
+A rustle stirred through the priestly throng. The canons looked askance
+at the prince and at one another. Then one of them spoke.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," he said gravely, and several instantly made chorus:
+"We have a bishop."
+
+The eyes of the young sovereign kindled. "You are wrong," he told them.
+"You had a bishop, but he is here no longer. He has deserted his see,
+after publishing this shameful thing." And he held aloft the crumpled
+interdict. "As I am a God-fearing, Christian knight, I will not live
+under this ban. Since the bishop who excommunicated me is gone, you will
+at once elect another in his place who shall absolve me."
+
+They stood before him, silent and impassive, in their priestly dignity,
+and in their assurance that the law was on their side.
+
+"Well?" the boy growled at them.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," droned a voice again.
+
+"Amen," boomed in chorus through the cloisters.
+
+"I tell you that your bishop is gone," he insisted, his voice quivering
+now with anger, "and I tell you that he shall not return, that he shall
+never set foot again within my city of Coimbra. Proceed you therefore at
+once to the election of his successor."
+
+"Lord," he was answered coldly by one of them, "no such election is
+possible or lawful."
+
+"Do you dare stand before my face, and tell me this?" he roared,
+infuriated by their cold resistance. He flung out an arm in a gesture
+of terrible dismissal. "Out of my sight, you proud and evil men! Back to
+your cells, to await my pleasure. Since in your arrogant, stiff-necked
+pride you refuse to do my will, you shall receive the bishop I shall
+myself select."
+
+He was so terrific in his rage that they dared not tell him that he had
+no power, prince though he might be, to make such an election, bowed to
+him, ever impassively, and with their hands still folded, unhurried as
+they had come, they now turned and filed past him in departure.
+
+He watched them with scowling brows and tightened lips, Moniz and Nunes
+silent behind him. Suddenly those dark, watchful eyes of his were held
+by the last figure of all in that austere procession--a tall, gaunt
+young man, whose copper-coloured skin and hawk-featured face proclaimed
+his Moorish blood. Instantly, maliciously, it flashed through the
+prince's boyish mind how he might make of this man an instrument to
+humble the pride of that insolent clergy. He raised his hand, and
+beckoned the cleric to him.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked him.
+
+"I am called Zuleyman, lord," he was answered, and the name
+confirmed--where, indeed, no confirmation was necessary--the fellow's
+Moorish origin.
+
+Affonso Henriques laughed. It would be an excellent jest to thrust upon
+these arrogant priests, who refused to appoint a bishop of their choice,
+a bishop who was little better than a blackamoor.
+
+"Don Zuleyman," said the prince, "I name you Bishop of Coimbra in the
+room of the rebel who has fled. You will prepare to celebrate High Mass
+this morning, and to pronounce my absolution."
+
+The Christianized Moor fell back a step, his face paling under its
+copper skin to a sickly grey. In the background, the hindmost members of
+the retreating clerical procession turned and stood at gaze, angered and
+scandalized by what they heard, which was indeed a thing beyond belief.
+
+"Ah no, my lord! Ah no!" Don Zuleyman was faltering. "Not that!"
+
+The prospect terrified him, and in his agitation he had recourse to
+Latin. "Domine, non sum dignus," he cried, and beat his breast.
+
+But the uncompromising Affonso Henriques gave him back Latin for Latin.
+
+"Dixi--I have spoken!" he answered sternly. "Do not fail me in
+obedience, on your life." And on that he clanked out again with his
+attendants, well-pleased with his morning's work.
+
+As he had disposed with boyish, almost irresponsible rashness, and in
+flagrant contravention of all canon law, so it fell out. Don Zuleyman,
+wearing the bishop's robes and the bishop's mitre, intoned the Kyrie
+Eleison before noon that day in the Cathedral of Coimbra, and pronounced
+the absolution of the Infante of Portugal, who knelt so submissively and
+devoutly before him.
+
+Affonso Henriques was very pleased with himself. He made a jest of the
+affair, and invited his intimates to laugh with him. But Emigio Moniz
+and the elder members of his council refused to laugh. They looked with
+awe upon a deed that went perilously near to sacrilege, and implored him
+to take their own sober view of the thing he had done.
+
+"By the bones of St. James!" he cried. "A prince is not to be
+brow-beaten by a priest."
+
+Such a view in the twelfth century was little short of revolutionary.
+The chapter of the Cathedral of Coimbra held the converse opinion that
+priests were not to be browbeaten by a prince, and set themselves to
+make Affonso Henriques realize this to his bitter cost. They dispatched
+to Rome an account of his unconscionable, high-handed, incredible
+sacrilege, and invited Rome to administer condign spiritual flagellation
+upon this errant child of Mother Church. Rome made haste to vindicate
+her authority, and dispatched a legate to the recalcitrant, audacious
+boy who ruled in Portugal. But the distance being considerable, and
+means of travel inadequate and slow, it was not until Don Zuleyman had
+presided in the See of Coimbra for a full two months that the Papal
+Legate made his appearance in Affonso Henriques' capital.
+
+A very splendid Prince of the Church was Cardinal Corrado, the envoy
+dispatched by Pope Honorius II., full armed with apostolic weapons to
+reduce the rebellious Infante of Portugal into proper subjection.
+
+His approach was heralded by the voice of rumour. Affonso Henriques
+heard of it without perturbation. His conscience at ease in the
+absolution which he had wrung from Mother Church after his own fashion,
+he was entirely absorbed in preparations for a campaign against the
+Moors which was to widen his dominions. Therefore when at length the
+thunderbolt descended, it fell--so far as he was concerned--from a sky
+entirely clear.
+
+It was towards dusk of a summer evening when the legate, in a litter
+slung in line between two mules, entered Coimbra. He was attended by two
+nephews, Giannino and Pierluigi da Corrado, both patricians of Rome,
+and a little knot of servants. Empanoplied in his sacred office, the
+cardinal had no need of the protection of men-at-arms upon a journey
+through god-fearing lands.
+
+He was borne straight to the old Moorish palace where the Infante
+resided, and came upon him there amid a numerous company in the great
+pillared hall. Against a background of battle trophies, livid weapons,
+implements of war, and suits of mail both Saracen and Christian, with
+which the bare walls were hung, moved a gaily-clad, courtly gathering of
+nobles and their women-folk, when the great cardinal, clad from head to
+foot in scarlet, entered unannounced.
+
+Laughter rippled into silence. A hush descended upon the company, which
+stood now at gaze, considering the imposing and unbidden guest. Slowly
+the legate, followed by the two Roman youths, advanced down the hall,
+the soft pad of his slippered feet and the rustle of his silken robes
+being at first the only sound. On he came, until he stood before the
+shallow dais, where in a massively carved chair sat the Infante of
+Portugal, mistrustfully observing him. Affonso Henriques scented here
+an enemy, an ally of his mother's, the bearer of a fresh declaration of
+hostilities. Therefore of deliberate purpose he kept his seat, as if to
+stress the fact that here he was the master.
+
+"Lord Cardinal," he greeted the legate, "be welcome to my land of
+Portugal."
+
+The cardinal bowed stiffly, resentful of this reception. In his long
+journey across the Spains, princes and nobles had flocked to kiss his
+hand, and bend the knee before him, seeking his blessing. Yet this
+mere boy, beardless save for a silky down about his firm young cheeks,
+retained his seat and greeted him with no more submissiveness than if he
+had been the envoy of some temporal prince.
+
+"I am the representative of our Holy Father," he announced, in a voice
+of stern reproof. "I am from Rome, with these my well-beloved nephews."
+
+"From Rome?" quoth Affonso Henriques. For all his length of limb and
+massive thews he could be impish upon occasion. He was impish now.
+"Although no good has ever yet come to me from Rome, you make me
+hopeful. His Holiness will have heard of the preparations I am making
+for a war against the Infidel that shall carry the Cross where now
+stands the Crescent, and sends me perhaps, a gift of gold or assist me
+in this holy work."
+
+The mockery of it stung the legate sharply. His sallow, ascetic face
+empurpled.
+
+"It is not gold I bring you," he answered, "but a lesson in the faith
+which you would seem to have forgotten. I am come to teach you your
+Christian duty, and to require of you immediate reparation of the
+sacrilegious wrongs you have done. The Holy Father demands of you the
+instant re-instatement of the Bishop of Coimbra, whom you have driven
+out with threats of violence, and the degradation of the cleric you
+blasphemously appointed Bishop in his stead."
+
+"And is that all?" quoth the boy, in a voice dangerously quiet.
+
+"No." Fearless in his sense of right, the legate towered before him.
+"It is demanded of you further that you instantly release the lady, your
+mother, from the unjust confinement in which you hold her."
+
+"That confinement is not unjust, as all here can witness," the Infante
+answered. "Rome may believe it, because lies have been carried to
+Rome. Dona Theresa's life was a scandal, her regency an injustice to my
+people. She and the infamous Lord of Trava lighted the torch of civil
+war in these dominions. Learn here the truth, and carry it to Rome. Thus
+shall you do worthy service."
+
+But the prelate was obstinate and proud.
+
+"That is not the answer that our Holy Father awaits."
+
+"It is the answer that I send."
+
+"Rash, rebellious youth, beware!" The cardinal's anger flamed up, and
+his voice swelled. "I come armed with spiritual weapons of destruction.
+Do not abuse the patience of Mother Church, or you shall feel the full
+weight of her wrath released against you."
+
+Exasperated, Affonso Henriques bounded to his feet, his face livid now
+with passion, his eyes ablaze.
+
+"Out! Away!" he cried. "Go, my lord, and go quickly, or as God watches
+us I will add here and now yet another sacrilege to those of which you
+accuse me."
+
+The prelate gathered his ample robes about him. If pale, he was entirely
+calm once more. With stern dignity, he bowed to the angry youth, and
+so departed, but with such outward impassivity that it would have been
+difficult to say with whom lay the victory. If Affonso Henriques thought
+that night that he had conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion.
+
+He was awakened early by a chamberlain at the urgent instances of Emigio
+Moniz, who was demanding immediate audience. Affonso Henriques sat up in
+bed, and bade him to be admitted.
+
+The elderly knight and faithful counsellor came in, treading heavily.
+His swarthy face was overcast, his mouth set in stern lines under its
+grizzled beard.
+
+"God keep you, lord," was his greeting, so lugubriously delivered as to
+sound like a pious, but rather hopeless, wish.
+
+"And you, Emigio," answered him the Infante. "You are early astir. What
+is the cause?"
+
+"I'll tidings, lord." He crossed the room, unlatched and flung wide a
+window. "Listen," he bade the prince.
+
+On the still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some gigantic
+hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso Henriques
+recognized it for the murmur of the multitude.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked, and thrust a sinewy leg from the bed.
+
+"It means that the Papal Legate has done all that he threatened, and
+something more. He has placed your city of Coimbra under a ban of
+excommunication. The churches are closed, and until the ban is lifted
+no priest will be found to baptize, marry, shrive or perform any other
+Sacrament of Holy Church. The people are stricken with terror, knowing
+that they share the curse with you. They are massing below at the gates
+of the alcazar, demanding to see you that they may implore you to lift
+from them the horror of this excommunication."
+
+Affonso Henriques had come to his feet by now, and he stood there
+staring at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart clutched
+by fear of these impalpable, blasting weapons that were being used
+against him.
+
+"My God!" he groaned, and asked: "What must I do?"
+
+Moniz was preternaturally grave. "It is of the first importance that the
+people should be pacified."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"There is one way only--by a promise that you will submit to the will
+of the Holy Father, and by penance seek absolution for yourself and your
+city."
+
+A red flush swept into the young cheeks that had been so pale.
+
+"What?" he cried, his voice a roar. "Release my mother, depose Zuleyman,
+recall that fugitive recreant who cursed me, and humble myself to seek
+pardon at the hands of this insolent Italian cleric? May my bones rot,
+may I roast for ever in hell-fire if I show myself such a craven! And
+do you counsel it, Emigio--do you really counsel that?" He was in a
+towering rage.
+
+"Listen to that voice," Emigio answered him, and waved a hand to the
+open window. "How else will you silence it?"
+
+Affonso Henriques sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his head in
+his hands. He was checkmated--and yet....
+
+He rose and beat his hands together, summoning chamberlain and pages to
+help him dress and arm.
+
+"Where is the legate lodged?" he asked Moniz.
+
+"He is gone," the knight answered him. "He left at cock-crow, taking the
+road to Spain along the Mondego--so I learnt from the watch at the River
+Gate."
+
+"How came they to open for him?"
+
+"His office, lord, is a key that opens all doors at any hour of day or
+night. They dared not detain or delay him."
+
+"Ha!" grunted the Infante. "We will go after him, then." And he made
+haste to complete his dressing. Then he buckled on his great sword, and
+they departed.
+
+In the courtyard of the alcazar, he summoned Sancho Nunes and a
+half-dozen men-at-arms to attend him, mounted a charger and with Emigio
+Moniz at his side and the others following, he rode out across the
+draw-bridge into the open space that was thronged with the clamant
+inhabitants of the stricken city.
+
+A great cry went up when he showed himself--a mighty appeal to him for
+mercy and the remission of the curse. Then silence fell, a silence that
+invited him to answer and give comfort.
+
+He reined in his horse, and standing in his stirrups very tall and
+virile, he addressed them.
+
+"People of Coimbra," he announced, "I go to obtain this city's
+absolution from the ban that has been laid upon it. I shall return
+before sunset. Till then do you keep the peace."
+
+The voice of the multitude was raised again, this time to hail him as
+the father and protector of the Portuguese, and to invoke the blessing
+of Heaven upon his handsome head.
+
+Riding between Moniz and Nunes, and followed by his glittering
+men-at-arms, he crossed the city and took the road along the river by
+which it was known that the legate had departed. All that morning
+they rode briskly amain, the Infante fasting, as he had risen, yet
+unconscious of hunger and of all else but the purpose that was consuming
+him. He rode in utter silence, his face set, his brows stern; and Moniz,
+watching him furtively the while, wondered what thoughts were stirring
+in that rash, impetuous young brain, and was afraid.
+
+Towards noon at last they overtook the legate's party. They espied his
+mule-litter at the door of an inn in a little village some ten miles
+beyond the foothills of the Bussaco range. The Infante reined up
+sharply, a hoarse, fierce cry escaping him, akin to that of some
+creature of the wild when it espies its prey.
+
+Moniz put forth a hand to seize his arm.
+
+"My lord, my lord," he cried, fearfully. "What is your purpose?"
+
+The prince looked him between the eyes, and his lips curled in a smile
+that was not altogether sweet.
+
+"I am going to beg Cardinal Corrado to have compassion on me," he
+answered, subtly mocking, and on that he swung down from his horse, and
+tossed the reins to a man-at-arms.
+
+Into the inn he clanked, Moniz and Nunes following closely. He thrust
+aside the vintner who, not knowing him, would have hindered him, great
+lord though he seemed, from disturbing the holy guest who was honouring
+the house. He strode on, and into the room where the Cardinal with his
+noble nephews sat at dinner.
+
+At sight of him, fearing violence, Giannino and Pierluigi came instantly
+to their feet, their hands upon their daggers. But Cardinal da Corrado
+sat unmoved. He looked up, a smile of ineffable gentleness upon his
+ascetic face.
+
+"I had hoped that you would come after me, my son," he said. "If you
+come a penitent, then has my prayer been heard."
+
+"A penitent!" cried Affonso Henriques. He laughed wickedly, and plucked
+his dagger from its sheath.
+
+Sancho Nunes, in terror, set a detaining hand upon his prince's arm.
+
+"My lord," he cried in a voice that shook, "you will not strike the
+Lord's anointed--that were to destroy yourself for ever."
+
+"A curse," said Affonso Henriques, "perishes with him that uttered it."
+He could reason loosely, you see, this hot-blooded, impetuous young
+cutter of Gordian knots. "And it imports above all else that the curse
+should be lifted from my city of Coimbra."
+
+"It shall be, my son, as soon as you show penitence and a Christian
+submission to the Holy Father's will," said the undaunted Cardinal.
+
+"God give me patience with you," Affonso Henriques answered him. "Listen
+to me now, lord Cardinal." And he leaned forward on his dagger, burying
+the point of it some inches into the deal table. "That you should punish
+me with the weapons of the Faith for the sins that you allege against me
+I can understand and suffer. There is reason in that, perhaps. But will
+you tell me what reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an
+offence which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?--and in punishing it
+by a curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are denied
+those true children of Mother Church, that no priestly office may be
+performed within the city, that men and women may not approach the
+altars of the Faith, that they must die unshriven with their sins upon
+them, and so be damned through all eternity? Where is the reason that
+urges this?"
+
+The cardinal's smile had changed from one of benignity to one of guile.
+
+"Why, I will answer you. Out of their terror they will be moved to
+revolt against you, unless you relieve them of the ban. Thus, Lord
+Prince, I hold you in check. You make submission or else you are
+destroyed."
+
+Affonso Henriques considered him a moment. "You answer me indeed,"
+said he, and then his voice swelled up in denunciation. "But this is
+statecraft, not religion. And when a prince has no statecraft to match
+that which is opposed to him, do you know what follows? He has recourse
+to force, Lord Cardinal. You compel me to it; upon your own head the
+consequences."
+
+The legate almost sneered. "What is the force of your poor lethal
+weapons compared with the spiritual power I wield? Do you threaten me
+with death? Do you think I fear it?" He rose in a surge of sudden wrath,
+and tore open his scarlet robe. "Strike here with your poniard. I
+wear no mail. Strike if you dare, and by the sacrilegious blow destroy
+yourself in this world and the next."
+
+The Infante considered him. Slowly he sheathed his dagger, smiling a
+little. Then he beat his hands together. His men-at-arms came in.
+
+"Seize me those two Roman whelps," he commanded, and pointed to Giannino
+and Pierlulgi. "Seize them, and make them fast. About it!"
+
+"Lord Prince!" cried the legate in a voice of appeal, wherein fear and
+anger trembled.
+
+It was the note of fear that heartened Affonso Henriques. "About it!"
+he cried again, though needlessly, for already his men-at-arms were
+at grips with the Cardinal's nephews. In a trice the kicking, biting,
+swearing pair were overpowered, deprived of arms, and pinioned. The men
+looked to their prince for further orders. In the background Moniz and
+Nunes witnessed all with troubled countenances, whilst the Cardinal,
+beyond the table, white to the lips, demanded in a quavering voice to
+know what violence was intended, implored the Infante to consider,
+and in the same breath threatened him with dread consequences of this
+affront.
+
+Affonso Henriques, unmoved, pointed through the window to a stalwart oak
+that stood before the inn.
+
+"Take them out there, and hang them unshriven," he commanded.
+
+The Cardinal swayed, and almost fell forward. He clutched the table,
+speechless with terror for those lads who were as the very apple of his
+eye, he who so fearlessly had bared his own breast to the steel.
+
+The two comely Italian youths were dragged out writhing in their
+captors' hands.
+
+At last the half-swooning legate found his voice. "Lord Prince," he
+gasped. "Lord Prince... you cannot do this infamy! You cannot! I warn
+you that... that..." The threat perished unuttered, slain by mounting
+terror. "Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as you hope for mercy!"
+
+"What mercy do you practice, you who preach a gospel of mercy in the
+world, and cry for mercy now?" the Infante asked him.
+
+"But this is an infamy! What harm have those poor children done? What
+concern is it of theirs that I have offended you in performing my sacred
+duty?"
+
+Swift into that opening flashed the home-thrust of the Infante's answer.
+
+"What harm have my people of Coimbra done? What concern is it of theirs
+that I have offended you? Yet to master me you did not hesitate to
+strike at them with the spiritual weapons that are yours. To master you
+I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews with the lethal weapons that
+are mine. When you shall have seen them hang you will understand the
+things that argument could not make clear to you. In the vileness of my
+act you will see a reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps
+your heart will be touched, your monstrous pride abated."
+
+Outside, under the tree, the figures of the men-at-arms were moving.
+Expeditiously, and with indifference, they went about the preparations
+for the task entrusted to them.
+
+The Cardinal writhed, and fought for breath. "Lord Prince, this must
+not be!" He stretched forth supplicating hands. "Lord Prince, you must
+release my nephews."
+
+"Lord Cardinal, you must absolve my people."
+
+"If... if you will first make submission. My duty... to the Holy See...
+Oh God! Will nothing move you?"
+
+"When they have been hanged you will understand, and out of your own
+affliction learn compassion." The Infante's voice was so cold, his
+mien so resolute that the legate despaired of conquering his purpose.
+Abruptly he capitulated, even as the halters went about the necks of his
+two cherished lads.
+
+"Stop!" he screamed. "Bid them stop! The curse shall be lifted."
+
+Affonso Henriques opened the window with a leisureliness which to the
+legate seemed to belong to the realm of nightmare.
+
+"Wait yet a moment," the Infante called to those outside, about whom by
+now a little knot of awe-stricken villagers had gathered. Then he
+turned again to Cardinal Corrado, who had sunk to his chair like a man
+exhausted, and sat now panting, his elbows on the table, his head in his
+hands. "Here," said the prince, "are the terms upon which you may have
+their lives: Complete absolution, and Apostolic benediction for my
+people and myself this very night, I on my side making submission to
+the Holy Father's will to the extent of releasing my mother from duress,
+with the condition that she leaves Portugal at once and does not return.
+As for the banished bishop and his successor, matters must remain as
+they are; but you can satisfy your conscience on that score by yourself
+confirming the appointment of Don Zuleyman. Come, my lord, I am being
+generous, I think. In the enlargement of my mother I afford you the
+means of satisfying Rome. If you have learnt your lesson from what I
+here proposed, your conscience should satisfy you of the rest."
+
+"Be it so," the Cardinal answered hoarsely. "I will return with you to
+Coimbra and do your will."
+
+Thereupon, without any tinge of mockery, but in completest sincerity
+in token that the feud between them was now completely healed, Affonso
+Henriques went down upon his knees, like the true and humble son of Holy
+Church he accounted himself, to ask a blessing at the Cardinal's hands.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+
+Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+
+The news of it first reached him whilst he sat at supper in the great
+hall of his palace in the Kremlin. It came at a time when already there
+was enough to distract his mind; for although the table before him was
+spread and equipped as became an emperor's, the gaunt spectre of famine
+stalked outside in the streets of Moscow, and men and women were so
+reduced by it that cannibalism was alleged to be breaking out amongst
+them.
+
+Alone, save for the ministering pages, sat Boris Godunov under the iron
+lamps that made of the table, with its white napery and vessels of
+gold and silver plate, an island of light in the gloom of that vast
+apartment. The air was fragrant with the scent of burning pine, for
+although the time of year was May, the nights were chill, and a great
+log-fire was blazing on the distant hearth. To him, as he sat there,
+came his trusted Basmanov with those tidings which startled him at
+first, seeming to herald that at last the sword of Nemesis was swung
+above his sinful head.
+
+Basmanov, a flush tinting the prominent cheek-bones of his sallow face,
+an excited glitter in his long eyes, began by ordering the pages out of
+earshot, then leaning forward quickly muttered forth his news.
+
+At the first words of it, the Tsar's knife clashed into his golden
+platter, and his short, powerful hands clutched the carved arms of
+his great gilded chair. Quickly he controlled himself, and then as he
+continued to listen he was moved to scorn, and a faint smile began to
+stir under his grizzled beard.
+
+A man had appeared in Poland--such was the burden of Basmanov's
+story--coming none knew exactly whence, who claimed to be Demetrius, the
+son of Ivan Vassielivitch, and lawful Tsar of Russia--Demetrius, who
+was believed to have died at Uglich ten years ago, and whose remains
+lay buried in Moscow, in the Church of St. Michael. This man had found
+shelter in Lithuania, in the house of Prince Wisniowiecki, and thither
+the nobles of Poland were now flocking to do him homage, acknowledging
+him the son of Ivan the Terrible. He was said to be the living image
+of the dead Tsar, save that he was swarthy and black-haired, like the
+dowager Tsarina, and there were two warts on his face, such as it was
+remembered had disfigured the countenance of the boy Demetrius.
+
+Thus Basmanov, adding that he had dispatched a messenger into Lithuania
+to obtain more precise confirmation of the story. That messenger--chosen
+in consequence of something else that Basmanov had been told--was
+Smirnoy Otrepiev.
+
+The Tsar Boris sat back in his chair, his eyes on the gem encrusted
+goblet, the stem of which his fingers were mechanically turning. There
+was now no vestige of the smile on his round white face. It had grown
+set and thoughtful.
+
+"Find Prince Shuiski," he said presently, "and send him to me here."
+
+Upon the tale the boyar had brought him he offered now no comment.
+
+"We will talk of this again, Basmanov," was all he said in
+acknowledgment that he had heard, and in dismissal.
+
+But when the boyar had gone, Boris Godunov heaved himself to his feet,
+and strode over to the fire, his great head sunk between his massive
+shoulders. He was a short, thick-set, bow-legged man, inclining to
+corpulence. He set a foot, shod in red leather reversed with ermine,
+upon an andiron, and, leaning an elbow on the carved overmantel, rested
+his brow against his hand. His eyes stared into the very heart of the
+fire, as if they beheld there the pageant of the past, upon which his
+mind was bent.
+
+Nineteen years were sped since Ivan the Terrible had passed away,
+leaving two sons, Feodor Ivanovitch, who had succeeded him, and the
+infant Demetrius. Feodor, a weakling who was almost imbecile, had
+married Irene, the daughter of Boris Godunov, whereby it had fallen out
+that Boris became the real ruler of Russia, the power behind the throne.
+But his insatiable ambition coveted still more. He must wear the crown
+as well as wield the sceptre; and this could not be until the Ruric
+dynasty which had ruled Russia for nearly seven centuries should be
+stamped out. Between himself and the throne stood his daughter's husband
+and their child, and the boy Demetrius, who had been dispatched with his
+mother, the dowager Tsarina, to Uglich. The three must be removed.
+
+Boris began with the last, and sought at first to drive him out of
+the succession without bloodshed. He attempted to have him pronounced
+illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of Ivan's seventh
+wife (the orthodox Church recognizing no wife as legitimate beyond the
+third). But in this he failed. The memory of the terrible Tsar, the
+fear of him, was still alive in superstitious Russia, and none dared to
+dishonour his son. So Boris had recourse to other and surer means. He
+dispatched his agents to Uglich, and presently there came thence a story
+that the boy, whilst playing with a knife, had been taken with a fit of
+epilepsy, and had fallen, running the blade into his throat. But it was
+not a story that could carry conviction to the Muscovites, since with it
+came the news that the town of Uglich had risen against the emissaries
+of Boris, charging them with the murder of the boy, and killing them out
+of hand.
+
+Terrible had been the vengeance which Boris had exacted. Of the luckless
+inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by his orders,
+and the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural Mountains, whilst
+the Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for having said that her boy was
+murdered at the instigation of Boris, was packed off to a convent, and
+had remained there ever since in close confinement.
+
+That had been in 1591. The next to go was Feodor's infant son, and
+lastly--in 1598--Feodor himself, succumbing to a mysterious illness, and
+leaving Boris a clear path to the throne. But he ascended it under the
+burden of his daughter's curse. Feodor's widow had boldly faced her
+father, boldly accused him of poisoning her husband to gratify his
+remorseless ambitions, and on a passionate appeal to God to let it be
+done by him as he had done by others she had departed to a convent,
+swearing never to set eyes upon him again.
+
+The thought of her was with him now, as he stood there looking into
+the heart of the fire; and perhaps it was the memory of her curse that
+turned his stout heart to water, and made him afraid where there could
+surely be no cause for fear. For five years now had he been Tsar of
+Russia, and in these five years he had taken such a grip of power as was
+not lightly to be loosened.
+
+Long he stood there, and there he was found by the magnificent Prince
+Shuiski, whom he had bidden Basmanov to summon.
+
+"You went to Uglich when the Tsarevitch Demetrius was slain," said
+Boris. His voice and mien were calm and normal. "Yourself you saw the
+body. There is no possibility that you could have been mistaken in it?"
+
+"Mistaken?" The boyar was taken aback by the question. He was a tall
+man, considerably younger than Boris, who was in his fiftieth year. His
+face was lean and saturnine, and there was something sinister in the
+dark, close-set eyes under a single, heavy line of eyebrow.
+
+Boris explained his question, telling him what he had learnt from
+Basmanov. Basil Shuiski laughed. The story was an absurd one. Demetrius
+was dead. Himself he had held the body in his arms, and no mistake was
+possible.
+
+Despite himself, a sigh of relief fluttered from the lips of Boris.
+Shuiski was right. It was an absurd story, this. There was nothing to
+fear. He had been a fool to have trembled for a moment.
+
+Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, he brooded more and more over
+all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that the nobility of
+Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki to do honour to this
+false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris found the chief cause of
+uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow, and empty bellies do not make
+for loyalty. Then, too, the Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had
+ruled too sternly, and had curbed their power. There were men like Basil
+Shuiski who knew too much--greedy, ambitious men, who might turn
+their knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to
+the pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a
+messenger to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he would
+yield up the person of this false Demetrius.
+
+But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin too
+late. The pretender had already left the place, and was safely lodged
+in the castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of Sandomir, to whose
+daughter Maryna he was betrothed. If these were ill tidings for Boris,
+there were worse to follow soon. Within a few months he learned from
+Sandomir that Demetrius had removed to Cracow, and that there he had
+been publicly acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of
+Ivan Vassielivitch, the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He
+heard, too, the story upon which this belief was founded. Demetrius had
+declared that one of the agents employed by Boris Godunov to procure
+his murder at Uglich had bribed his physician Simon to perform the deed.
+Simon had pretended to agree as the only means of saving him. He had
+dressed the son of a serf, who slightly resembled Demetrius, in garments
+similar to those worn by the young prince, and thereafter cut the lad's
+throat, leaving those who had found the body to presume it to be
+the prince's. Meanwhile, Demetrius himself had been concealed by the
+physician, and very shortly thereafter carried away from Uglich, to be
+placed in safety in a monastery, where he had been educated.
+
+Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the court
+of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich came forward
+now to identify with him the grown man, who carried in his face so
+strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That story which Boris now
+heard was soon heard by all Russia, and Boris realized that something
+must be done to refute it.
+
+But something more than assurances--his own assurances--were necessary
+if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last Boris bethought
+him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the murdered boy. He had her
+fetched to Moscow from her convent, and told her of this pretender who
+was setting up a claim to the throne of Russia, supported by the King of
+Poland.
+
+She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes and
+conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had
+done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these
+last twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost
+under her very eyes.
+
+"It is a circumstantial tale," she said. "It is perhaps true. It is
+probably true."
+
+"True!" He bounded from his seat. "True? What are you saying, woman?
+Yourself you saw the boy dead."
+
+"I did, and I know who killed him."
+
+"But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set the
+people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him."
+
+"Yes," she answered. And added the question: "What do you want of me
+now?"
+
+"What do I want?" He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated. Had
+the conventual confinement turned her head? "I want your testimony. I
+want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor that he is. The people
+will believe you."
+
+"You think they will?" Interest had kindled in her glance.
+
+"What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a mother
+know her own son?"
+
+"You forget. He was ten years of age then--a child. Now he is a grown
+man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be sure of
+anything?"
+
+He swore a full round oath at her. "Because you saw him dead."
+
+"Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of yours
+who killed him. Yet you made me swear--as the price of my brothers'
+lives--that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken than we thought.
+Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at all. Perhaps this man's
+tale is true."
+
+"Perhaps..." He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully, searchingly.
+"What do you mean?" he asked her sharply.
+
+Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that once had
+been so lovely. "I mean that if the devil came out of hell and called
+himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your undoing."
+
+Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon her
+wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His jaw dropped
+foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes.
+
+"The people will believe me, you say--they will believe that a mother
+should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation numbered."
+
+If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he was
+forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the weapon with
+which she could destroy him. The result of it was that she went back to
+her convent under close guard, and was thereafter confined with greater
+rigour than hitherto.
+
+Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining ground
+in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be sceptical, but
+Boris knew that he could not trust them, since they had no cause to love
+him. He began perhaps to realize that it is not good to rule by fear.
+
+And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he had
+been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation of the
+rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the pretender's real
+identity.
+
+The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none other
+than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a monk, but,
+unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had abandoned himself to
+licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy had been chosen by Basmanov
+for this particular mission.
+
+The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor in
+proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to Sigismund
+III. to proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to demand his expulsion
+from the Kingdom of Poland; and his denunciation was supported by a
+solemn excommunication pronounced by the Patriarch of Moscow against
+the unfrocked monk, Grishka Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself
+Demetrius Ivanovitch.
+
+But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris expected.
+It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly, accomplished man,
+speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian, skilled in horsemanship
+and in the use of arms, and it was asked how an unfrocked monk had come
+by these accomplishments. Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had
+prevented the Tsarina Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives
+of revenge, he had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that,
+actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had prevented
+her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers Nagoy repaired
+to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their nephew, and to enrol
+themselves under his banner.
+
+Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The sword of
+Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out. Nothing remained
+him but to arm and go forth to meet the impostor, who was advancing upon
+Moscow with a great host of Poles and Cossacks.
+
+He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They, too,
+had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen him slain.
+Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was it possible that
+Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well as the Palatine of
+Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the adventurer, Prince Adam
+Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false Demetrius had first made his
+appearance, and all those Polish nobles who flocked to his banner? Or
+were they, too, moved by some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?
+
+That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time--in the winter
+of 1604--he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent them because,
+crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of leading them was denied
+him. He was forced to stay at home in the gloomy apartments of the
+Kremlin, fretted by care, with the ghosts of his evil past to keep him
+company, and assure him that the hour of judgment was at hand.
+
+With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to the
+adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he sent
+Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at Dobrinichi,
+and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which compelled him to fall back
+on Putioli. He lost all his infantry, and every Russian taken in arms on
+the pretender's side was remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.
+
+Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed and
+no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of the past
+gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then there was ever
+present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the pretender's identity. At
+last, one evening in April, he sent for Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him
+again concerning that nephew of his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It
+is not good to be the uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a
+great prince.
+
+Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white face
+was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had lost all its
+erstwhile firm vigour.
+
+"I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching this
+lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked monk, who
+claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that you have made no
+mistake--are you sure?"
+
+Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his mien.
+But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be mistaken. I am
+sure."
+
+Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His terrible
+eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the mental stage in
+which he mistrusted everything and everybody.
+
+"You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.
+
+"Highness, I swear..."
+
+"Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would Sigismund of
+Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you say? When I denounced
+him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev, would not Sigismund have
+verified the statement had it been true?"
+
+"The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius..." Otrepiev was
+beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.
+
+"Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after--long
+after--my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie. Will you
+stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until the rack pulls
+you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"
+
+"Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these years."
+
+"The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the whole
+truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your nephew."
+
+And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread. "He is
+not my nephew."
+
+"Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"
+
+Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon them
+before the irate Tsar.
+
+"I did not lie--not altogether. I told you a half-truth, Highness. His
+name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which he always has been
+known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I said, and the son of my
+brother's wife."
+
+"Then... then..." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he understood. "And his
+father?"
+
+"Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King Stephen's
+natural son."
+
+Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.
+
+"This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of course
+it is true. It is the light at last... at last. You may go."
+
+Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly. He
+could not know of how little account to Boris was the deception he had
+practiced in comparison with the truth he had now revealed, a truth
+that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon the dark mystery of the false
+Demetrius. The problem that so long had plagued the Tsar was solved at
+last.
+
+This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son of
+Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund of Poland
+and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the score of his
+identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading nobles of Poland,
+knew the man for what he was, and because of it supported him, using the
+fiction of his being Demetrius Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and
+facilitate the pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the
+object of it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and
+a Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already had
+sacrificed a throne--that of Sweden--to his devout conscience, and he
+saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not heard that a
+Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this Nuncio had been a stout
+supporter of the pretender's claim? What could be the Pope's concern in
+the Muscovite succession? Why should a Roman priest support the claim of
+a prince to the throne of a country devoted to the Greek faith?
+
+At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of this
+business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and Sigismund
+had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an elected King of
+Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious son of Stephen Bathory
+one who might perhaps supplant him on the Polish throne. To divert
+his ambition into another channel he had fathered--if he had not
+invented--this fiction that the pretender was the dead Demetrius.
+
+Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from the
+first, what months of annoyance might he not have been spared; how easy
+it might have been to prick this bubble of imposture. But better late
+than never. To-morrow he would publish the true facts, and all the world
+should know the truth; and it was a truth that must give pause to those
+fools in this superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek
+Church, who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
+being baited for them.
+
+There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign envoys,
+and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had been for many
+a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was now to do, by the
+conviction that he held the false Demetrius in the hollow of his hand.
+There to those envoys he would announce to-night what to-morrow he would
+announce to all Russia--tell them of the discovery he had made, and
+reveal to his subjects the peril in which they stood. Towards the close
+of the banquet he rose to address his guests, announcing that he had
+an important communication for them. In silence they waited for him to
+speak. And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into
+his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face empurpling
+until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his mouth and nostrils.
+
+He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel and
+wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting aside of
+earthly vanities, and then he expired.
+
+It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His death
+was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is nothing in the
+manner of it to justify the opinion that it resulted from anything other
+than an apoplexy.
+
+His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow to
+place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this lad of
+sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the army, being
+now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious Shuiski, went over
+at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him Tsar of Russia. Thereafter
+events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched on Moscow, entered it in triumph,
+and again proclaimed Demetrius, whereupon the people rose in revolt
+against the son of the usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled
+the boy and his mother.
+
+Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his life at
+the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the Muscovites that the
+boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not that of Demetrius, but of a
+peasant's son, who had been murdered in his stead.
+
+That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's path, and
+he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet before he occupied
+it, he showed the real principles that actuated him, proved how true had
+been Boris's conclusion. He ordered the arrest and degradation of the
+Patriarch who had denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place
+appointed Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to
+the Roman communion.
+
+On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his triumphal
+entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before the tomb of Ivan
+the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina Maria, who, after a brief
+communion with him in private, came forth publicly to acknowledge him as
+her son.
+
+Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she
+purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had been
+a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was her proper due. After
+all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in addition to
+restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the hated Boris
+Godunov.
+
+His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing
+adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia, with
+Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at first all went
+well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure of popularity. If his
+swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his bearing was so courtly and
+gracious that he won his way quickly to the hearts of his people. For
+the rest he was of a tall, graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a
+knightly address at arms.
+
+But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to serve
+two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the orthodox Russians
+whose tsar he was, and on the other there were the Poles, who had made
+him so at a price, and who now demanded payment. Because he saw that
+this payment would be difficult and fraught with peril to himself
+he would--after the common wont of princes who have attained their
+objects--have repudiated the debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or
+at least to evade, the persistent reminders that reached him from the
+Papal Nuncio, to whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of
+the Roman faith.
+
+But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different terms.
+The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had reached him that
+Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had taken refuge in England,
+adding that he might be tempted to restore the fugitive to the throne of
+Muscovy.
+
+The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused Demetrius
+to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken, which were
+precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a beginning he granted the
+Jesuits permission to build a church within the sacred walls of the
+Kremlin, whereby he gave great scandal. Soon followed other signs that
+he was not a true son of the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by
+his indifference to public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs,
+and by surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he
+conferred high offices and dignities.
+
+And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling against
+him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they had been
+swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat Shuiski,
+who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he expected,
+who resented, above all, to see Basmanov--who had ever been his
+rival--invested with a power second only to that of the Tsar himself.
+Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his underground, burrowing
+fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who in their turn wrought upon the
+populace, and presently all was seething disaffection under a surface
+apparently calm.
+
+The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter of
+the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow, the
+bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and the feasting
+that followed found little favour in the eyes of the Muscovites, who now
+beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.
+
+The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May, 1606.
+And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so skilfully laid.
+Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built before the walls
+of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had planned for the
+entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad that the fort was
+intended to serve as an engine of destruction, and that the martial
+spectacle was a pretence, the real object being that from the fort the
+Poles were to cast firebrands into the city, and then proceed to the
+slaughter of the inhabitants.
+
+No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated populace.
+They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May they stormed
+the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski himself, to the cry of
+"Death to the heretic! Death to the impostor!"
+
+They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the Tsar's
+bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword in hand to
+bar the way and give his master time to escape. The Tsar leapt from
+a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his leg, and lay there
+helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who presently discovered him.
+
+He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius
+Ivanovitch. Nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked monk.
+
+It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the hands of
+priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his
+doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of
+priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous
+sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one
+of them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if
+he had been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and
+tortured, and finally broken him so that he died.
+
+That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme of human
+things. And that part being played, the rest mattered little. In the
+nature of him and of his position it was impossible that his imposture
+should be other than ephemeral.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+
+An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+
+Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in those
+early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the previous
+October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de Torquemada,
+acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand and Isabella--had
+appointed the first inquisitors for Castile, ordering them to set up a
+Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to deal with the apostatizing said to
+be rampant among the New-Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so
+large a proportion of the population.
+
+Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
+of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
+circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that they
+should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos and never be
+found beyond them after nightfall, and that they should not practice as
+doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or innkeepers. The desire to emancipate
+themselves from these and other restrictions upon their commerce with
+Christians and from the generally intolerable conditions of bondage
+and ignominy imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and
+embrace Christianity.
+
+But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions of
+faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought. Bitter
+racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never extinguished by
+their conversion.
+
+Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal, sinister
+pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded inquisitors, with
+their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--headed by a Dominican
+bearing the white Cross, which invaded the city of Seville one day
+towards the end of December and took its way to the Convent of St. Paul,
+there to establish the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the
+New-Christians that they were to be the object of the attentions of this
+dread tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
+city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the Duke of
+Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of Arcos.
+
+This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed
+inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth
+that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons had
+departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds of heretical
+pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of Castile that within
+fifteen days they should make an exact return of the persons of both
+sexes who had sought refuge in their lordships or jurisdictions; that
+they arrest all these and lodge them in the prison of the Inquisition in
+Seville, confiscating their property, and holding it at the disposal
+of the inquisitors; that none should shelter any fugitive under pain
+of greater excommunication and of other penalties by law established
+against abettors of heretics.
+
+The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women merely
+because they had departed from Seville before departure was in any way
+forbidden, revealed the severity with which the inquisitors intended to
+proceed. It completed the consternation of the New-Christians who had
+remained behind, and how numerous these were may be gathered from the
+fact that in the district of Seville alone they numbered a hundred
+thousand, many of them occupying, thanks to the industry and talent
+characteristic of their race, positions of great eminence. It even
+disquieted the well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all
+his vain, empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known
+perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a lineage that
+went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian blood, untainted by
+any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid alleged to flow in Hebrew
+veins. But it happened that he was in love with the daughter of the
+millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl whose beauty was so extraordinary
+that she was known throughout Seville and for many a mile around as
+la Hermosa Fembra; and he knew that such commerce--licit or illicitly
+conducted--was disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the
+girl had been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy
+fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It had
+been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast himself
+the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de Susan; it was
+exasperating to discover now a new and more imperative reason for this
+odious secrecy.
+
+Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more aggrieved
+than that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped in his black
+cloak, he gained the Calle de Ataud on that January night.
+
+Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily escaladed
+balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella, the delight of her
+effaced all other considerations. Her father was from home, as she had
+told him in the note that summoned him; he was away at Palacios on some
+merchant's errand, and would not return until the morrow. The servants
+were all abed, and so Don Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and
+lounge at his ease upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon
+him with a Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in
+which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her bower, a
+long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and taste. The walls
+were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with costly Eastern rugs;
+on an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-beaked lamp of beaten copper
+charged with aromatic oil shed light and perfume through the apartment.
+
+Don Rodrigo sipped his wine, and his dark, hungry eyes followed her as
+she moved about him with vaguely voluptuous, almost feline grace. The
+wine, the heavy perfume of the lamp, and the beauty of her played
+havoc among them with his senses, so that he forgot for the moment his
+Castilian lineage and clean Christian blood, forgot that she derived
+from the accursed race of the Crucifiers. All that he remembered was
+that she was the loveliest woman in Seville, daughter to the wealthiest
+man, and in that hour of weakness he decided to convert into reality
+that which had hitherto been no more than an infamous presence. He would
+loyally fulfil the false, disloyal promises he had made. He would take
+her to wife. It was a sacrifice which her beauty and her wealth should
+make worth while. Upon that impulse he spoke now, abruptly:
+
+"Isabella, when will you marry me?"
+
+She stood before him, looking down into his weak, handsome face, her
+fingers interlacing his own. She merely smiled. The question did
+not greatly move her. Not knowing him for the scoundrel that he was,
+guessing nothing of the present perturbation of his senses, she found it
+very natural that he should ask her to appoint the day.
+
+"It is a question you must ask my father," she answered him.
+
+"I will," said he, "to-morrow, on his return." And he drew her down
+beside him.
+
+But that father was nearer than either of them dreamed. At that very
+moment the soft thud of the closing housedoor sounded through the house.
+It brought her sharply to her feet, and loose from his coiling arms,
+with quickened breath and blanching face. A moment she hung there,
+tense, then sped to the door of the room, set it ajar and listened.
+
+Up the stairs came the sound of footsteps and of muttering voices. It
+was her father, and others with him.
+
+With ever-mounting fear she turned to Don Rodrigo, and breathed the
+question: "If they should come here?"
+
+The Castilian stood where he had risen by the divan, his face paler
+now than its pale, aristocratic wont, his eyes reflecting the fear that
+glittered in her own. He had no delusion as to what action Diego de
+Susan would take upon discovering him. These Jewish dogs were quickly
+stirred to passion, and as jealous as their betters of the honour of
+their womenfolk. Already Don Rodrigo in imagination saw his clean red
+Christian blood bespattering that Hebrew floor, for he had no weapon
+save the heavy Toledo dagger at his girdle, and Diego de Susan was not
+alone.
+
+It was, he felt, a ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain. But his
+dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another moment she had
+bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the chamber's end, a tiny
+closet that was no better than a cupboard contrived for the storing of
+household linen. She had-moved with a swift precision which at another
+time might have provoked his admiration, snatching up his cloak and hat,
+and other evidences of his presence, quenching the lamp, and dragging
+him to that place of cramped concealment, which she remained to share
+with him.
+
+Came presently movements in the room beyond, and the voice of her
+father:
+
+"We shall be securest from intrusion here. It is my daughter's room.
+If you will give me leave, I will go down again to admit our other
+friends."
+
+Those other friends, as Don Rodrigo gathered, continued to arrive for
+the next half-hour, until in the end there must have been some twenty
+of them assembled in that chamber. The mutter of voices had steadily
+increased, but so confused that no more than odd words, affording no
+clue to the reason of this gathering, had reached the hidden couple.
+
+And then quite suddenly a silence fell, and on that silence beat the
+sharp, clear voice of Diego de Susan addressing them.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I have called you hither that we may concert
+measures for the protection of ourselves and all New-Christians in
+Seville from the fresh peril by which we are menaced. The edict of the
+inquisitors reveals how much we have to fear. You may gather from it
+that the court of the Holy Office is hardly likely to deal in justice,
+and that the most innocent may find himself at any moment exposed to
+its cruel mercies. Therefore it is for us now to consider how to protect
+ourselves and our property from the unscrupulous activities of this
+tribunal. You are the principal New Christian citizens of Seville;
+you are wealthy, not only in property, but also in the goodwill of the
+people, who trust and respect, and at need will follow, you. If nothing
+less will serve, we must have recourse to arms; and so that we
+are resolute and united, my friends, we shall prevail against the
+inquisitors."
+
+Within the alcove, Don Rodrigo felt his skin roughening with horror at
+this speech, which breathed sedition not only against the Sovereigns,
+but against the very Church. And with his horror was blent a certain
+increase of fear. If his situation had been perilous before, it was
+tenfold more dangerous now. Discovery, since he had overheard this
+treason, must mean his certain death. And Isabella, realizing the same
+to the exclusion of all else, clutched his arm and cowered against him
+in the dark.
+
+There was worse to follow. Susan's address was received with a murmur
+of applause, and then others spoke, and several were named, and their
+presence thus disclosed. There was the influential Manuel Sauli, who
+next to Susan was the wealthiest man in Seville; there was Torralba, the
+Governor of Triana; Juan Abolafio, the farmer of the royal customs, and
+his brother Fernandez, the licentiate, and there were others--all of
+them men of substance, some even holding office under the Crown. Not one
+was there who dissented from anything that Susan had said; rather did
+each contribute some spur to the general resolve. In the end it was
+concerted that each of those present should engage himself to raise a
+proportion of the men, arms and money that would be needed for their
+enterprise. And upon that the meeting was dissolved, and they departed.
+Susan himself went with them. He had work to do in the common cause, he
+announced, and he would do it that very night in which it was supposed
+that he was absent at Palacios.
+
+At last, when all had gone, and the house was still again, Isabella and
+her lover crept forth from their concealment, and in the light of the
+lamp which Susan had left burning each looked into the other's white,
+startled face. So shaken was Don Rodrigo with horror of what he had
+overheard, and with the terror of discovery, that it was with difficulty
+he kept his teeth from chattering.
+
+"Heaven protect us!" he gasped. "What Judaizing was this?"
+
+"Judaizing!" she echoed. It was the term applied to apostacy, to the
+relapse of New-Christians to Judaism, an offense to be expiated at the
+stake. "Here was no Judaizing. Are you mad, Rodrigo? You heard no single
+word that sinned against the Faith."
+
+"Did I not? I heard treason enough to."
+
+"No, nor treason either. You heard honourable, upright men considering
+measures of defence against oppression, injustice, and evil
+acquisitiveness masquerading in the holy garments of religion."
+
+He stared askance at her for a moment, then his full lips curled into a
+sneer. "Of course you would seek to justify them," he said. "You are of
+that foul brood yourself. But you cannot think to cozen me, who am of
+clean Old-christian blood and a true son of Mother Church. These men
+plot evil against the Holy Inquisition. Is that not Judaizing when it is
+done by Jews?"
+
+She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from her
+great dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult. Yet still she
+sought to reason with him.
+
+"They are not Jews--not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in holy
+orders. All of them are Christians, and..."
+
+"Newly-baptized!" he broke in, sneering viciously. "A defilement of that
+holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is revealed by what
+passed here just now. Jews they were born, the sons of Jews, and Jews
+they remain under their cloak of mock Christianity, to be damned as
+Jews in the end." He was panting now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal
+inflamed this profligate defiler. "God forgive me that ever I entered
+here. Yet I do believe that it was His will that I should come to
+overhear what is being plotted. Let me depart from hence."
+
+With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the door. Her
+clutch upon his arm arrested him.
+
+"Whither do you go?" she asked him sharply. He looked now into her eyes,
+and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw nothing of the
+hatred into which her love had been transmuted in that moment by his
+unsparing insults to herself, her race and her home, by the purpose
+which she clearly read in him.
+
+"Whither?" he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
+
+"Whither my Christian duty bids me."
+
+It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her purpose,
+she had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle, and armed with
+it stood between the door and him.
+
+"A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven watches
+us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must talk awhile
+before you go."
+
+Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine
+religious zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak woman's hand.
+Rapidly to-night was she coming into real knowledge of this Castilian
+gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for her lover. It was a
+knowledge that was to sear her presently with self-loathing and
+self-contempt. But for the moment her only consideration was that, as a
+direct result of her own wantonness, her father stood in mortal peril.
+If he should perish through the deletion of this creature, she would
+account herself his slayer.
+
+"You have not considered that the deletion you intend will destroy my
+father," she said quietly.
+
+"There is my Christian duty to consider," answered he, but without
+boldness now.
+
+"Perhaps. But there is something you must set against it. Have you no
+duty as a lover--no duty to me?"
+
+"No earthly duty can weigh against a spiritual obligation...."
+
+"Ah, wait! Have patience. You have not well considered, that is plain.
+In coming here in secret you wronged my father. You will not trouble to
+deny it.
+
+"Jointly we wronged him, you and I. Will you then take advantage of
+something learnt whilst you were hiding there like a thief from the
+consequences of what you did, and so do him yet this further wrong?"
+
+"Must I wrong my conscience?" he asked her sullenly.
+
+"Indeed, I fear you must."
+
+"Imperil my immortal soul?" He almost laughed.
+
+"You talk in vain."
+
+"But I have something more than words for you." With her left hand she
+drew upon the fine gold chain about her neck, and brought forth a tiny
+jewelled cross. Passing the chain over her head, she held it out.
+
+"Take this," she bade him. "Take it, I say. Now, with that sacred symbol
+in your hand, make solemn oath to divulge no word of what you have
+learnt here tonight, or else resign yourself to an unshriven death. For
+either you take that oath, or I rouse the servants and have you dealt
+with as one who has intruded here unbidden for an evil end." She backed
+away from him as she spoke, and threw wide the door. Then, confronting
+him from the threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder
+than a whisper. "Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with all
+your sins upon you, and so destroy for all eternity the immortal soul
+that urges you to this betrayal, or will you take the oath that I
+require?"
+
+He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she cut
+him short. "For the last time!" she bade him. "Will you decide?"
+
+He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
+conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the words
+of the formidable oath that she administered, an oath which it must damn
+his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because she imagined that
+she had taken the measure of his faith, she returned him his dagger,
+and let him go at last. She imagined that she had bound him fast in
+irrefragable spiritual bonds.
+
+And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had been
+present at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by order of the
+Holy Office of the Inquisition, she still clung to that belief. Yet
+presently a doubt crept in, a doubt that she must at all costs resolve.
+And so presently she called for her litter, and had herself carried to
+the Convent of St. Paul, where she asked to see Frey Alonso de Ojeda,
+the Prior of the Dominicans of Seville.
+
+She was left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room pervaded
+by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple of chairs and
+a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great, gaunt crucifix hanging
+upon one of its whitewashed walls.
+
+Thither came presently two Dominican friars. One of these was a
+harsh-featured man of middle height and square build, the uncompromising
+zealot Ojeda. The other was tall and lean, stooping slightly at the
+shoulders, haggard and pale of countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark
+eyes, and a tender, wistful mouth. This was the Queen's confessor, Frey
+Tomas de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her,
+leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her with
+eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
+
+"You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan," he said,
+in a gentle voice. "God help and strengthen you, my child, against the
+trials that may be in store for you. What do you seek at our poor hands?
+Speak, child, without fear."
+
+"Father," she faltered, "I come to implore your pity."
+
+"No need to implore it, child. Should I withhold pity who stand myself
+in need of pity, being a sinner--as are we all."
+
+"It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy."
+
+"So I supposed." A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the tender
+melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. "If your father is
+innocent of what has been alleged against him, the benign tribunal of
+the Holy Office will bring his innocence to light, and rejoice therein;
+if he is guilty, if he has strayed--as we may all stray unless fortified
+by heavenly grace--he shall be given the means of expiation, that his
+salvation may be assured him."
+
+She shivered at the words. She knew the mercy in which the inquisitors
+dealt, a mercy so spiritual that it took no account of the temporal
+agonies inflicted to ensure it.
+
+"My father is innocent of any sin against the Faith," said she.
+
+"Are you so sure?" croaked the harsh voice of Ojeda, breaking in.
+"Consider well. Remember that your duty as a Christian is above your
+duty as a daughter."
+
+Almost had she bluntly demanded the name of her father's accuser, that
+thus she might reach the object of her visit. Betimes she checked the
+rash impulse, perceiving that subtlety was here required; that a direct
+question would close the door to all information. Skilfully, then, she
+chose her line of attack.
+
+"I am sure," she exclaimed, "that he is a more fervent and pious
+Christian--New-Christian though he be--than his accuser."
+
+The wistfulness faded from Torquemada's eyes. They grew keen, as became
+the eyes of an inquisitor, the eyes of a sleuth, quick to fasten on a
+spoor. But he shook his head.
+
+Ojeda advanced. "That I cannot believe," said he. "The deletion was
+made from a sense of duty so pure that the delator did not hesitate to
+confess the sin of his own commission through which he had discovered
+the treachery of Don Diego and his associates."
+
+She could have cried out in anguish at this answer to her unspoken
+question. Yet she controlled herself, and that no single doubt should
+linger, she thrust boldly home.
+
+"He confessed it?" she cried, seemingly aghast. The friar slowly nodded.
+"Don Rodrigo confessed?" she insisted, as will the incredulous.
+
+Abruptly the friar nodded again; and as abruptly checked, recollecting
+himself.
+
+"Don Rodrigo?" he echoed, and asked: "Who mentioned Don Rodrigo?"
+
+But it was too late. His assenting nod had betrayed the truth, had
+confirmed her worst fear. She swayed a little; the room swam round
+her, she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation against that
+forsworn betrayer surged to revive her. If it was through her weakness
+and undutifulness that her father had been destroyed, through her
+strength should he be avenged, though in doing so she pulled down and
+destroyed herself.
+
+"And he confessed to his own sin?" she was repeating slowly, ever on
+that musing, incredulous note. "He dared confess himself a Judaizer?"
+
+"A Judaizer!" Sheer horror now overspread the friar's grim countenance.
+"A Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!"
+
+"But I thought you said he had confessed."
+
+"Why, yes, but... but not to that." Her pale lips smiled, sadly
+contemptuous.
+
+"I see. He set limits of prudence upon his confession. He left out
+his Judatting practices. He did not tell you, for instance, that this
+deletion was an act of revenge against me who refused to marry him,
+having discovered his unfaith, and fearing its consequences in this
+world and the next."
+
+Ojeda stared at her in sheer, incredulous amazement.
+
+And then Torquemada spoke: "Do you say that Don Rodrigo de Cardona is a
+Judaizer? Oh, it is unbelievable."
+
+"Yet I could give you evidence that should convince you."
+
+"Then so you shall. It is your sacred duty, lest you become an abettor
+of heresy, and yourself liable to the extreme penalty."
+
+It would be a half-hour later, perhaps, when she quitted the Convent
+of St. Paul to return home, with Hell in her heart, knowing in life no
+purpose but that of avenging the parent her folly had destroyed. As she
+was being carried past the Alcazar, she espied across the open space
+a tall, slim figure in black, in whom she recognized her lover, and
+straightway she sent the page who paced beside her litter to call him to
+her side. The summons surprised him after what had passed between them;
+moreover, considering her father's present condition, he was reluctant
+to be seen in attendance upon the beautiful, wealthy Isabella de Susan.
+Nevertheless, urged on by curiosity, he went.
+
+Her greeting increased his surprise.
+
+"I am in deep distress, Rodrigo, as you may judge," she told him sadly.
+"You will have heard what has befallen my father?"
+
+He looked at her sharply, yet saw nothing but loveliness rendered more
+appealing by sorrow. Clearly she did not suspect him of betrayal; did
+not realize that an oath extorted by violence--and an oath, moreover, to
+be false to a sacred duty--could not be accounted binding.
+
+"I... I heard of it an hour ago," he lied a thought unsteadily. "I... I
+commiserate you deeply."
+
+"I deserve commiseration," answered she, "and so does my poor father,
+and those others. It is plain that amongst those he trusted there was
+a traitor, a spy, who went straight from that meeting to inform against
+them. If I but had a list it were easy to discover the betrayer. One
+need but ascertain who is the one of all who were present whose arrest
+has been omitted." Her lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. "What
+is to become of me now, alone in the world?" she asked him. "My father
+was my only friend."
+
+The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw here a
+noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.
+
+"Your only friend?" he asked her thickly. "Was there no one else? Is
+there no one else, Isabella?"
+
+"There was," she said, and sighed heavily. "But after what befell last
+night, when... You know what is in my mind. I was distraught then,
+mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so that I could not even
+consider his sin in its full heinousness, nor see how righteous was your
+intent to inform against him. Yet I am thankful that it was not by
+your deletion that he was taken. The thought of that is to-day my only
+consolation."
+
+They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm to
+assist her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to accompany her
+within. But she denied him.
+
+"Not now--though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will come
+and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more able to
+receive you--that is, if I am forgiven for..."
+
+"Not another word," he begged her. "I honour you for what you did. It is
+I who should sue to you for forgiveness."
+
+"You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!" And so she
+left him.
+
+She had found him--had she but known it--a dejected, miserable man in
+the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying Susan he had
+acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage, and partly from
+a sense of religious duty. In counting later the cost to himself,
+he cursed the folly of his rage, and began to wonder if such strict
+observance of religious duty was really worth while to a man who had his
+way to make in the world. In short, he was in the throes of reaction.
+But now, in her unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never
+know. The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of
+deletions--since to do otherwise might be to discourage delators--and
+there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such as took place
+in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de Ataud better pleased
+with the world than he had been since morning.
+
+On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a servant
+announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his hopes, and
+thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he received from her
+a letter which made him the most ample amends:
+
+"Rodrigo,--There is a matter on which we must come early to an
+understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and
+sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated, since as
+the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit. For myself I care
+little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo, since if in spite of what
+has happened you would still wish to make me your wife, as you declared
+on Monday, it would be my wish to come to you well dowered. Now the
+inheritance which would be confiscated by the Holy Office from the
+daughter of a heretic might not be so confiscated from the wife of a
+gentleman of Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide as
+your heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to me.
+
+"Isabella."
+
+She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
+consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His fortune
+was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it seemed, Rodrigo
+was given the chance to make his own by marrying the beautiful Isabella
+at once, before sentence came to be passed upon her father. The
+Holy Office might impose a fine, but would not go further where the
+inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of clean lineage was concerned. He
+was swayed between admiration of her shrewdness and amazement at his own
+good fortune. Also his vanity was immensely flattered.
+
+He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his resolve
+to marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in person, as she had
+bidden him, to carry out the resolve.
+
+She received him in the mansion's best room, a noble chamber furnished
+with a richness such as no other house in Seville could have boasted.
+She had arrayed herself for the interview with an almost wanton cunning
+that should enhance her natural endowments. Her high-waisted gown,
+low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice, was of cloth of gold, edged
+with miniver at skirt and cuffs and neck. On her white bosom hung a
+priceless carcanet of limpid diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of
+her bronze-coloured hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never
+had Don Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure
+and glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now his
+olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms, kissing her
+cheek, her lips, her neck.
+
+"My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!" he murmured, rapturously. Then added
+the impatient question: "The priest? Where is the priest that shall make
+us one?"
+
+Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance.
+Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted in a
+smile that maddened him.
+
+"You love me, Rodrigo--in spite of all?"
+
+"Love you!" It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost inarticulate
+ejaculation. "Better than life--better than salvation."
+
+She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. "Oh, I am
+glad--so glad--that your love for me is truly strong. I am about to put
+it to the test, perhaps."
+
+He held her very close. "What is this test, beloved?"
+
+"It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
+indissoluble save by death."
+
+"Why, so do I," quoth he, who had so much to gain.
+
+"And, therefore, because after all, though I profess Christianity, there
+is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a marriage that must satisfy
+even my father when he regains his freedom, as I believe he will--for,
+after all, he is not charged with any sin against the faith."
+
+She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his ardour.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, and his voice was strained.
+
+"I mean--you'll not be angry with me?--I mean that I would have us
+married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner,
+but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish
+rites."
+
+Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their
+grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
+
+"Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you'll
+not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife
+you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish
+blood."
+
+His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads
+of sweat stood out upon his brow.
+
+"My God!" he groaned. "What do you ask? I... I can't. It were a
+desecration, a defilement."
+
+She thrust him from her in a passion. "You regard it so? You protest
+love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you
+will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the
+faith that was my forbears', if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you,
+else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me."
+
+Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought
+to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted
+torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she
+had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He
+could go his ways.
+
+The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration,
+a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million
+maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished.
+There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his
+condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement of
+the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained
+where Christian scruples were already half-effaced.
+
+"You do not realize," he cried. "If it were known that I so much as
+contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of
+apostasy, and send me to the fire."
+
+"If that were your only objection it were easily overcome," she informed
+him coldly. "For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is
+waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's sake betray us, and who
+else will ever know?"
+
+"You can be sure of that?"
+
+He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his
+turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten
+in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage
+that filled him with such repugnance.
+
+And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in
+which the conspirators had met.
+
+"Where is the Rabbi?" he asked impatiently, looking round that empty
+room.
+
+"I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him."
+
+"Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?"
+
+"No," she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. "Yet I would not
+have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to this." They were
+odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He was hardly master of the
+wits which in themselves were never of the brightest. "I require you
+to declare that it is your own desire that our marriage should be
+solemnized in accordance with the Jewish rites and the law of Moses."
+
+And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing done and
+ended, made answer hastily:
+
+"Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be so
+married--in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law of Moses.
+And now, where is the Rabbi?" He caught a sound and saw a quiver in
+the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove. "Ah! He is here, I
+suppose...."
+
+He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his hands
+in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside, and forth
+stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt man, stooping
+slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white habit and black cloak of
+the order of St. Dominic, his face lost in the shadows of a black cowl.
+Behind him stood two lay brothers of the order, two armed familiars of
+the Holy Office, displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.
+
+Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those terribly
+damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood blankly at gaze a
+moment, not even seeking to understand how this dread thing had come to
+pass.
+
+The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the
+tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful came the voice of
+that deeply sincere and saintly man.
+
+"My son, I was told this of you--that you were a Judaizer--yet before
+I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in one of your
+lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses. Oh, my poor child, by
+what wicked counsels have you been led so far astray?" The sweet, tender
+eyes of the inquisitor were luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing pity
+shook his gentle voice.
+
+And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this exploded. He
+flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate denunciation.
+
+"It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into this. It
+was a trap she baited for my undoing."
+
+"It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith which I
+was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of heretical pravity the
+trap had never caught you; had your faith been strong, my son, you could
+not have been seduced from loyalty to your Redeemers."
+
+"Father! Hear me, I implore you!" He flung down upon his knees, and held
+out shaking, supplicating hands.
+
+"You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any man
+unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had been told
+that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved that it should be
+so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you opened the gates of your
+soul to evil. But remembering that age and reason will often make good
+and penitent amends for the follies of early life, I hoped and prayed
+for you. Yet that you should Judaize--that you should be bound in
+wedlock by the unclean ties of Judaism--Oh!" The melancholy voice
+broke off upon a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his
+hands--long, white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. "Pray now,
+my child, for grace and strength," he exhorted. "Offer up the little
+temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your error,
+and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you shall deserve
+salvation from that Divine Mercy which is boundless. You shall have my
+prayers, my son. I can do no more. Take him hence."
+
+On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the first
+Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-conspirators,
+and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented but little of the
+ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these proceedings. But the
+essentials were already present.
+
+In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green Cross of
+the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom walked two
+by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter the Martyr, the
+familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned, candle in hand,
+barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential sack. Hemmed about by
+halberdiers, they were paraded through the streets to the Cathedral,
+where Mass was said and a sermon of the faith preached to them by
+the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were conveyed beyond the city to the
+meadows of Tablada, where the stake and faggots awaited them.
+
+Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
+accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra, avenged
+by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by falseness the
+instrument of her father's ruin.
+
+For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But
+she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she
+returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister
+denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her
+skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de
+Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the
+fleshless, grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon
+four hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
+legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+
+The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+
+There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human frailty
+which we call History a sadder story than this of the Princess Anne, the
+natural daughter of the splendid Don John of Austria, natural son of the
+Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-brother to the bowelless King Philip
+II. of Spain. Never was woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was
+more utterly the victim of the circumstances of her birth.
+
+Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as witness the
+dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural daughters--and
+especially for one who, like herself, bore a double load of
+cadency--there was little use or hope. Their royal blood set them in a
+class apart; their bastardy denied them the worldly advantages of that
+spurious eminence. Their royal blood prescribed that they must mate with
+princes; their bastardy raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore,
+since the world would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it
+was expedient to withdraw them from the world before its vanities
+beglamoured them, and to immure them in convents, where they might
+aspire with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
+
+Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been sent to
+the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence removed thence
+to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at Madrigal, where it was
+foreordained that she should take the veil. She went unwillingly. She
+had youth, and youth's hunger of life, and not even the repressive
+conditions in which she had been reared had succeeded in extinguishing
+her high spirit or in concealing from her the fact that she was
+beautiful. On the threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle's
+will was to be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have
+beheld the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
+made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to bear
+witness that she did not go of her own free will.
+
+But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's was,
+under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to soften the
+sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he accounted due to one
+of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty accorded her certain privileges
+unusual to members of religious communities: he granted her a little
+civil list--two ladies-in-waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her
+the title of Excellency, which she still retained even when after her
+hurried novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
+where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in vain;
+but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected body moved
+mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go to make up the
+grey monotone of conventual existence; in which one day is as another
+day, one hour as another hour; in which the seasons of the year
+lose their significance; in which time has no purpose save for its
+subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping and waking, to eating and
+fasting, to praying and contemplating, until life loses all purpose and
+object, and sterilizes itself into preparation for death.
+
+Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit remained
+unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might encompass her;
+in time and by slow degrees she might become absorbed into the grey
+spirit of the place. But that time was not yet. For the present she must
+nourish her caged and starving soul with memories of glimpses caught in
+passing of the bright, active, stirring world without; and where memory
+stopped she had now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of
+high adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but
+to feed and swell her yearnings.
+
+This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of the
+order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved in the
+great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-witness. And above
+all he loved to talk of that last romantic King of Portugal, with
+whom he had been intimate, that high-spirited, headstrong, gallant,
+fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at the age of four-and-twenty had led
+the disastrous overseas expedition against the Infidel, which had been
+shattered on the field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
+
+He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants he had
+seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was embarking with
+crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights and men-at-arms, the
+array of German and Italian mercenaries, the young king in his bright
+armour, bare of head--an incarnation of St. Michael--moving forward
+exultantly amid flowers and acclamations to take ship for Africa. And
+she would listen with parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body
+bending forward in her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic.
+Anon when he came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir,
+her dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly
+truthful. He did not say that military incompetence and a presumptuous
+vanity which would listen to no counsels had been the cause of a ruin
+that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal, and finally the very kingdom
+itself. He represented the defeat as due to the overwhelming numbers
+of the Infidel, and dwelt at length upon the closing scene, told her
+in fullest detail how Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of
+those who urged him to fly when all was lost, how the young king, who
+had fought with a lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day's
+defeat, had turned and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to fight
+his last fight and find a knightly death. Thereafter he was seen no
+more.
+
+It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more and more
+deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him with questions
+touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin, concerning his ways
+of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when he came to the crown
+of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de Souza told her served but
+to engrave more deeply upon her virgin mind the adorable image of the
+knightly king. Ever present in the daily thoughts of this ardent girl,
+his empanoplied figure haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that
+her waking senses would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the
+memory of someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the
+memory of the dream--words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten
+of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind not
+calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She was
+enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth, a
+mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She mourned
+him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily and nightly for the
+repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently
+for death that should unite her with him. Taking joy in the thought that
+she should go to him a maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood
+that had been imposed upon her.
+
+One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange excitement.
+
+"Is it so certain that he is dead?" she asked. "When all is said, none
+actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body surrendered by
+Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond recognition. Is it not
+possible that he may have survived?"
+
+The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
+impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
+
+"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he lives,
+and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to deliver his
+country from the thrall of Spain."
+
+"Then... then..."
+
+Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it wishes to
+believe."
+
+"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.
+
+He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on his
+ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in the shadow
+of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed over the wide
+quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and burial ground.
+Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of invisible but ubiquitously
+pulsating life, three nuns, young and vigorous, their arms bared to
+the elbows, the skirts of their black habits shortened by a cincture of
+rope, revealing feet roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and
+mattock, digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of
+the cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
+Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by King
+Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-waiting as
+claustral conditions would permit.
+
+At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
+
+"Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my way to
+preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as befitted
+one who had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned by a person of
+eminence to have a care of what I said of Don Sebastian, for not only
+was he alive, but he would be secretly present at the Requiem."
+
+He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted lips.
+
+"But that," he added, "was fifteen years ago, and since then I have had
+no sign. At first I thought it possible... there was a story afloat that
+might have been true... But fifteen years!" He sighed, and shook his
+head.
+
+"What... what was the story?" She was trembling from head to foot.
+
+"On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the gates of
+the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid guard refused to
+open to them, they announced that one of them was King Sebastian, and
+so won admittance. One of the three was wrapped in a cloak, his
+face concealed, and his two companions were observed to show him the
+deference due to royalty."
+
+"Why, then..." she was beginning.
+
+"Ah, but afterwards," he interrupted her, "afterwards, when all
+Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied that King
+Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was affirmed to have been no
+more than a ruse of those men's to gain the shelter of the city."
+
+She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to draw from
+him the admission that it was possible denial and explanation obeyed the
+wishes of the hidden prince.
+
+"Yes, it is possible," he admitted at length, "and it is believed by
+many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-spirited.
+The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon him that he
+preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a throne of which he
+now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal believes it so, and waits and
+hopes."
+
+When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the clear
+conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who hoped
+more fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or yearned more
+passionately to acclaim him should he show himself. And that was much to
+think, for the yearning of Portugal was as the yearning of the slave for
+freedom.
+
+Sebastian's mother was King Philip's sister, whereby King Philip had
+claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of Portugal.
+Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that foreign rule, and
+Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply, passionately patriotic man,
+had been foremost among those who had sought to liberate her. When Don
+Antonio, the sometime Prior of Crato, Sebastian's natural cousin, and
+a bold, ambitious, enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt,
+the friar had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those
+days Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
+renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
+preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had wielded a
+vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had unstintingly exerted
+on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was profoundly devoted. After Don
+Antonio's army had been defeated on land by the Duke of Alba, and his
+fleet shattered in the Azores in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz,
+Frey Miguel found himself deeply compromised by his active share in the
+rebellion. He was arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In
+the end, because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II.,
+aware of the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
+gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la Real,
+where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant of the
+Princess Anne of Austria.
+
+But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
+nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio--who,
+restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad--or yet to
+abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his life was ever
+the independence of Portugal, with a native prince upon the throne.
+And because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that grew almost daily into
+conviction, that Sebastian had survived and would return one day to
+claim his kingdom, those two at Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the
+great stream of life, were drawn more closely to each other.
+
+But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered and the
+deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again. Gradually she
+reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all hopes were set upon a
+reunion with the unknown beloved in the world to come.
+
+One evening in the spring of 1594--four years after the name of
+Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess--Frey
+Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a village whose
+every inhabitant was known to him, when he came suddenly face to face
+with a stranger. A stranger would in any case have drawn his attention,
+but there was about this man something familiar to the friar, something
+that stirred in him vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of
+shabby black was that of a common townsman, but there was something in
+his air and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded
+chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of
+intrepidity and assurance.
+
+Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips of
+the stranger--who, in the fading light, might have been of any age from
+thirty to fifty--a puzzled frown upon the brow of the friar. Then the
+man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"God save your paternity," was his greeting.
+
+"God save you, my son," replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him. "I
+seem to know you. Do I?"
+
+The stranger laughed. "Though all the world forget, your paternity
+should remember me."
+
+And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. "My God!" he cried,
+and set a hand upon the fellow's shoulder, looking deeply into those
+bold, grey eyes. "What make you here?"
+
+"I am a pastry-cook."
+
+"A pastry-cook? You?"
+
+"One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
+Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the
+Convent here, and so for the sake of old times--of happier times--I
+bethought me that I might claim your paternity's support." He spoke with
+a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
+
+"Assuredly..." began the priest, and then he checked. "Where is your
+shop?"
+
+"Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?"
+
+Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
+
+For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
+celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he went
+straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the early hour,
+desired to see her Excellency.
+
+"Lady," he told her, "I have great news; news that will rejoice your
+heart." She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in his sunken
+eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones. "Don Sebastian
+lives. I have seen him."
+
+A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she paled
+until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her brow; her
+breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed upon her feet,
+and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady and save herself from
+falling. He saw that he had blundered by his abruptness, that he had
+failed to gauge the full depth of her feelings for the Hidden Prince,
+and for a moment feared that she would swoon under the shock of the news
+he had so recklessly delivered.
+
+"What do you say? Oh, what do you say?" she moaned, her eyes
+half-closed.
+
+He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting all
+the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses. Gradually she
+quelled the storm of her emotions.
+
+"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour suffused
+her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became radiant. "Where
+is he?"
+
+"Here. Here in Madrigal."
+
+"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"
+
+"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime preacher and
+counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real. He came to seek me.
+He comes disguised, under the false name of Gabriel de Espinosa,
+and setting up as a pastry-cook until his term of penance shall be
+completed, and he shall be free to disclose himself once more to his
+impatiently awaiting people."
+
+It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
+turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and dreadful
+fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the constant
+companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent, imaginative,
+starved Soul had come to love with a consuming passion, was a living
+reality near at hand, to be seen in the flesh by the eyes of her body.
+It was a thought that set her in an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared
+not ask Frey Miguel to bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him
+with questions, and so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.
+
+Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the Holy
+Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed that he
+had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the pride that had
+brought him down, by roaming the world in humble guise, earning his
+bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat of his brow like any
+common hind, until he should have purged his offense and rendered
+himself worthy once more to resume the estate to which he had been born.
+
+It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It exalted her
+hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in her fond dreams,
+particularly when to that general outline were added in the days that
+followed details of the wanderings and sufferings of the Hidden Prince.
+At last, some few weeks after that first startling announcement of his
+presence, in the early days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel
+proposed to her the thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
+
+"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all these
+years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply touched. He desires
+your leave to come and prostrate himself at your feet."
+
+She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom heaved in
+tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint consent.
+
+Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour,
+where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in the
+background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle height,
+dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme simplicity, yet
+without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had first discovered him.
+
+His hair was of a light brown--the colour to which the golden locks of
+the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago might well have
+faded--his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes were grey. His face was
+handsome, and save for the colour of his eyes and the high arch of his
+nose presented none of the distinguishing and marring features peculiar
+to the House of Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his
+mother.
+
+Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before her.
+
+"I am here to receive your Excellency's commands," he said.
+
+She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
+
+"Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up as a
+pastry-cook?" she asked him.
+
+"To serve your Excellency."
+
+"Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least understand
+is that of a pastry-cook."
+
+The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep sigh.
+
+"If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should not now
+be reduced to following this one."
+
+She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between them was
+very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a promise to come
+soon again, and the undertaking on her side to procure for his shop the
+patronage of the convent.
+
+Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass celebrated
+by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel--which was open to the public--and
+afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy and accompany him thence
+to the convent parlour, where the Princess waited, usually with one
+or another of her attendant nuns. These daily interviews were brief
+at first, but gradually they lengthened until they came to consume
+the hours to dinner-time, and presently even that did not suffice, and
+Sebastian must come again later in the day.
+
+And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also in
+intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's future came
+to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself. His penance had been
+overlong already for what was really no fault at all, since it is the
+heart rather than the deed that Heaven judges, and his heart had been
+pure, his intention in making war upon the Infidel loftily pious.
+Diffidently he admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel
+were of opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
+II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be long
+delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip might oppose
+Sebastian's claims.
+
+Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he spent
+in Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal, within and
+without the convent. She was a nun professed, interdicted from seeing
+any man but her confessor other than through the parlour grating,
+and even then not at such length or with such constancy as this. The
+intimacy between them--fostered and furthered by Frey Miguel--had so
+ripened in a few weeks that Anne was justified in looking upon him as
+her saviour from the living tomb to which she had been condemned, in
+hoping that he would restore her to the life and liberty for which she
+had ever yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
+own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been against
+her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she was still
+within the five probationary years prescribed. Therefore, in her view,
+her vows were revocable.
+
+But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or knowledge,
+and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there was none bold
+enough, considering Anne's royal rank, to offer remonstrance or advice,
+particularly too, considering that her behaviour had the sanction of
+Frey Miguel, the convent's spiritual adviser. But from without, from the
+Provincial of the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
+respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous visits she
+received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk, for which it would
+be wise to cease to give occasion. That recommendation scorched her
+proud, sensitive soul with shame. She sent her servant Roderos at once
+to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed the letter in his hands.
+
+The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
+
+"It was to have been feared," he said, and sighed.
+
+"There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined. Don
+Sebastian must go."
+
+"Go?" Fear robbed her of breath. "Go where?"
+
+"Away from Madrigal--anywhere--and at once; tomorrow at latest." And
+then, seeing the look of horror in her face, "What else, what else?"
+he added, impatiently. "This meddlesome provincial may be stirring up
+trouble already."
+
+She fought down her emotion. "I... I shall see him before he goes?" she
+begged.
+
+"I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider." He flung away in
+deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life was slipping
+from her.
+
+That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room, hoping
+against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona Maria de Grado
+brought word that Espinosa was even then in the convent in Frey Miguel's
+cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled thence without her seeing
+him, And careless of the impropriety of the hour--it was already eight
+o'clock and dusk was falling--she at once dispatched Roderos to the
+friar, bidding him bring Espinosa to her in the parlour.
+
+The friar obeyed, and the lovers--they were no less by now--came face to
+face in anguish.
+
+"My lord, my lord," she cried, casting all prudence to the winds, "what
+is decided?"
+
+"That I leave in the morning," he answered.
+
+"To go where?" She was distraught.
+
+"Where?" He shrugged. "To Valladolid at first, and then... where God
+pleases."
+
+"And when shall I see you again?"
+
+"When... when God pleases."
+
+"Oh, I am terrified... if I should lose you... if I should never see you
+more!" She was panting, distraught.
+
+"Nay, lady, nay," he answered. "I shall come for you when the time is
+ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at the latest, and I
+shall bring with me one who will avouch me."
+
+"What need any to avouch you to me?" she protested, on a note of
+fierceness. "We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free to
+roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless..."
+
+"Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together. See."
+He stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of pounce, some
+quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a quill, and wrote with
+labour, for princes are notoriously poor scholars:
+
+"I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to wife
+the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most serene
+Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the dispensation which I hold
+from two pontiffs."
+
+And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in all
+ages--"El Rey"--the King.
+
+"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.
+
+"How shall this scrawl content me?"
+
+"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."
+
+Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey Miguel
+urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot her own grief,
+and became all solicitude for him, until naught would content her but
+she must empty into his hands her little store of treasure--a hundred
+ducats and such jewels as she possessed, including a gold watch set with
+diamonds and a ring bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of
+all a portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
+
+At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel had gone
+on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he had passionately
+urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had done the same by the
+Princess both weeping now. At last he was gone, and on the arm of Dona
+Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne staggered back to her cell to weep and
+pray.
+
+In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed by her
+sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last she sought to
+mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither he had repaired. Of
+all those letters only two survive.
+
+"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we suffer by
+absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I did not seek
+the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend some moments in
+communion with you, there would be an end to me. What I feel to-day is
+what I feel every day when I recall the happy moments so deliciously
+spent, which are no more. This privation is for me so severe a
+punishment of heaven that I should call it unjust, for without cause I
+find myself deprived of the happiness missed by me for so many years
+and purchased at the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord,
+how willingly, nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the
+misfortunes that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the
+least of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
+term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
+suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It were
+impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
+
+"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I plighted to
+you I shall keep in life and in death, for death itself could not
+tear it from my soul, and this immortal soul will harbour it through
+eternity..."
+
+Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King Philip of
+Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his Valladolid retreat.
+How he filled his days we do not know, beyond the fact that he moved
+freely abroad. For it was in the streets of that town that meddlesome
+Fate brought him face to face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom
+Espinosa had been a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.
+
+Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's
+garments were not in their first freshness they were far from being
+those of a plebeian.
+
+"In whose service may you be now?" quoth the intrigued Gregorio, so soon
+as greetings had passed between them.
+
+Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand of
+his sometime comrade. "Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I am not in
+anybody's service, rather do I require servants myself."
+
+"Why, what is your present situation?"
+
+Loftily Espinosa put him off. "No matter for that," he answered, with a
+dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his cloak about him
+to proceed upon his way. "If there is anything you wish for I shall be
+happy, for old times' sake, to oblige you."
+
+But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
+readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an unsuspected
+state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio. Gregorio's wife
+would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and to hear from his own
+lips of his improved and prosperous state. Gregorio would take no
+refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding to his insistence, went with
+him to the sordid quarter where Gregorio had his dwelling.
+
+About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
+three--Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter displayed
+none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa's prosperity which
+Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed her evil envy, and
+it may have been to nourish it--which is the surest way to punish
+envy--that he made Gregorio a magnificent offer of employment.
+
+"Enter my service," said he, "and I will pay you fifty ducats down and
+four ducats a month."
+
+Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince them he
+displayed a gold watch--most rare possession--set with diamonds, a ring
+of price, and other costly jewels. The couple stared now with dazzled
+eyes.
+
+"But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you had
+been a pastry-cook at Ocana?" burst from Gregorio.
+
+Espinosa smiled. "How many kings and princes have been compelled to
+conceal themselves under disguises?" he asked oracularly. And seeing
+them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it seems, was
+sacred to him--not even the portrait of that lovely, desolate royal lady
+in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked it, and thrust it to them
+across the stains of wine and oil that befouled their table.
+
+"Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain," he bade
+them. "A prince could not have a lovelier bride."
+
+"But she is dressed as a nun," the woman protested. "How, then, can she
+marry?"
+
+"For kings there are no laws," he told her with finality.
+
+At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer he
+had made him. He would come again for the cook's reply, leaving word
+meanwhile of where he was lodged.
+
+They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the woman's
+disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous fear that
+what he had told them of himself might, after all, be true. Upon that
+malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an information with Don Rodrigo
+de Santillan, the Alcalde of Valladolid.
+
+Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find his room
+invaded by alguaziles--the police of the Alcalde. He was arrested and
+dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of himself and of certain
+objects of value found in his possession--more particularly of a ring,
+on the cameo of which was carved a portrait of King Philip.
+
+"I am Gabriel de Espinosa," he answered firmly, "a pastry-cook of
+Madrigal."
+
+"Then how come you by these jewels?"
+
+"They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her account. That
+is the business that has brought me to Valladolid."
+
+"Is this Dona Ana's portrait?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you, then,
+pretend that these were also given you to sell?"
+
+"Why else should they be given me?"
+
+Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as for the
+lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for that? The Alcalde
+conned his man more closely, and noted that dignity of bearing, that
+calm assurance which usually is founded upon birth and worth. He sent
+him to wait in prison, what time he went to ransack the fellow's house
+in Madrigal.
+
+Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner mysteriously
+found means to send a warning that enabled Frey Miguel to forestall the
+Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival, the friar had abstracted
+from Espinosa's house a box of papers which he reduced to ashes.
+Unfortunately Espinosa had been careless. Four letters not confided
+to the box were discovered by the alguaziles. Two of them were from
+Anne--one of which supplies the extract I have given; the other two from
+Frey Miguel himself.
+
+Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
+reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile was kept
+on the alert by the persistent plottings of the Portuguese Pretender,
+Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He was intimate with the past
+life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-sacrificing patriotism and passionate
+devotion to the cause of Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of
+his prisoner, and leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his
+hands--the man whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms
+by the title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
+had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered the
+arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana at the
+convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the effect of
+surprise. He opened the interview by holding up before her one of the
+letters he had found, asking her if she acknowledged it for her own.
+
+She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his hands,
+tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he caught her wrists
+in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little regard in that moment for
+the blood royal in her veins. King Philip was a stern master, pitiless
+to blunderers, and Don Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he
+suffer that precious letter to be destroyed.
+
+Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments and
+confessed the letter her own.
+
+"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-cook, and
+to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the magistrate.
+
+"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
+she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir and
+subsequent penitential wanderings.
+
+Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
+convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King Philip.
+His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once dispatched Don
+Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the Holy Office to Madrigal
+to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne should be solitarily confined
+in her cell, and her nuns-in-waiting and servants placed under arrest.
+
+Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the prison
+of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with an escort of
+arquebusiers.
+
+"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
+guards, half-mockingly.
+
+Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos, a
+travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that he spoke
+both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos addressed him in
+Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and replied that although he
+had been in Portugal, he could not speak the language.
+
+Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three chief
+prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--succeeded one
+another with a wearisome monotony of results. The Apostolic Commissary
+interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel; Don Rodrigo conducted the
+examinations of Espinosa. But nothing was elicited that took the matter
+forward or tended to dispel its mystery.
+
+The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
+tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times insulting
+interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don Sebastian, and
+wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him for her honour's sake
+to proclaim himself what he really was, declaring to him that the time
+had come to cast off all disguise.
+
+Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
+Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and the
+air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie that
+asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don Rodrigo had
+now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under examination, ever evading
+the magistrate's practiced point when it sought to pin him, and he was
+no less careful to say nothing that should incriminate either of the
+other two prisoners. He denied that he had ever given himself out to be
+Don Sebastian, though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had
+persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.
+
+He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating that he
+had never known either of them--an answer this which would have fitted
+the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after his father's death, and
+quitted in early infancy by his mother.
+
+As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
+that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the belief
+that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He protested that
+he had acted in good faith throughout, and without any thought of
+disloyalty to the King of Spain.
+
+Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison, Espinosa
+was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the Alcalde. At once
+he would have risen and dressed.
+
+"Nay," said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, "that is not necessary for
+what is intended."
+
+It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with tousled
+hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly interpreted
+into a threat of torture. His face grew white.
+
+"It is impossible," he protested. "The King cannot have ordered what you
+suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a man of honour.
+He may require my death, but in an honourable manner, and not upon the
+rack. And as for its being used to make me speak, I have nothing to add
+to what I have said already."
+
+The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim smile.
+
+"I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions. Sometimes
+you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and sometimes a person of
+honourable degree. To hear you at this moment one might suppose that to
+submit you to torture would be to outrage your dignity. What then..."
+
+Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch from the
+hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of the prisoner,
+who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the Alcalde had detected.
+In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that the prisoner's hair and beard
+had turned grey at the roots, and so received the last proof that he had
+to do with the basest of impostures. The fellow had been using dyes,
+the supply of which had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo
+departed well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.
+
+Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too late, and
+even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded to its natural
+grey, and he presented the appearance of what in fact he was--a man of
+sixty, or thereabouts.
+
+Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
+him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from Frey
+Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations, that the
+full truth--known to himself alone--was extracted by the rack.
+
+He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent desire
+to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never abandoned the
+hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio, the Prior of
+Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had devised a plan, primarily
+inspired by the ardent nature of the Princess Anne and her impatience of
+the conventual life. It was while casting about for the chief instrument
+that he fortuitously met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa
+had been a soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain
+and Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had befriended
+Frey Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point of being invaded
+by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril of it. Thus they had
+become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had an instance of the man's
+resource and courage. Further, he was of the height of Don Sebastian and
+of the build to which the king might have grown in the years that were
+sped, and he presented other superficial resemblances to the late king.
+The colour of his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be
+made to play the part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was
+waiting so passionately and confidently. There had been other impostors
+aforetime, but they had lacked the endowments of Espinosa, and their
+origins could be traced without difficulty. In addition to these natural
+endowments, Espinosa should be avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody
+in the world was better qualified in such a matter--and by the niece of
+King Philip, to whom he would be married when he raised his standard.
+It was arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the
+arrangements were complete, where the Pretender would be accredited by
+the exiled friends of Don Antonio residing there--the Prior of Crato
+being a party to the plot. From France Frey Miguel would have worked in
+Portugal through his agents, and presently would have gone there
+himself to stir up a national movement in favour of a pretender so
+fully accredited. Thus he had every hope of restoring Portugal to her
+independence. Once this should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would
+appear in Lisbon, unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of
+the kingdom which had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from Spain.
+
+That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a singleness of
+aim and a detachment from minor considerations that never hesitated
+to sacrifice the princess, together with the chief instrument of the
+intrigue. Was the liberation of a kingdom, the deliverance of a nation
+from servitude, the happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance
+against the fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a
+soldier of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
+plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in Espinosa and
+the man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to dazzle the Gonzales
+at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to the end, which he suffered
+in October of 1595, a full year after his arrest. To the last he avoided
+admissions that should throw light upon his obscure identity and origin.
+
+"If it were known who I am..." he would say, and there break off.
+
+He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with calm
+fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the like dignity,
+after having undergone degradation from his priestly dignity.
+
+As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of shame and
+humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the previous July. The
+Apostolic Commissary notified her of the sentence which King Philip
+had confirmed. She was to be transferred to another convent, there to
+undergo a term of four years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to
+fast on bread and water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of
+ever holding any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term
+as an ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency
+to be extinguished, together with all other honours and privileges
+conferred upon her by King Philip.
+
+The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the King, her
+uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable Philip of Spain
+unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the hunger of her starved
+heart, and chafing under the ascetic life imposed upon her, she had
+allowed herself to be fascinated by the prospect of becoming the
+protectress of one whom she believed to be an unfortunate and romantic
+prince, and of exchanging her convent for a throne.
+
+Her punishment--poor soul--endured for close upon forty years, but the
+most terrible part of it was not that which lay within the prescription
+of King Philip, but that which arose from her own broken and humiliated
+spirit. She had been uplifted a moment by a glorious hope, to be cast
+down again into the blackest despair, to which a shame unspeakable and a
+tortured pride were added.
+
+Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+V. THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+
+The Assassination of Henry IV
+
+In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV. of
+France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
+
+In their conjunction these two events were to influence the destinies of
+Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough, since it was as much
+a commonplace that an old gentleman should die as that Henry of Bearn
+should fall in love. Love had been the main relaxation of his otherwise
+strenuous life, and neither the advancing years--he was fifty-six
+at this date--nor the recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his
+long-suffering Florentine wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
+
+Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King Henry;
+probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in
+women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his
+grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from
+the latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his
+self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned
+Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
+adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
+
+This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in the
+affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I have said,
+in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is difficult, without being
+ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a girl of twenty. Unfortunately
+for him, Charlotte does not appear to have found him so. On the
+contrary, her lovely, empty head was so turned by the flattery of his
+addresses, that she came to reciprocate the passion she inspired.
+
+Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal de
+Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged, the marshal
+found the match extremely suitable, and was willing enough, until the
+King declared himself. Henry used the most impudent frankness.
+
+"Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend," said he. "I am in love,
+and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency. If you should
+marry her I should hate you. If she should love me you would hate me. A
+breach of our friendship would desolate me, for I love you with sincere
+affection."
+
+That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further with a
+marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most probably give him
+to choose between assuming the ridiculous role of a complacent husband
+and being involved in a feud with his prince. He said as much, and
+thanked the King for his frankness, whereupon Henry, liking him more
+than ever for his good sense, further opened his mind to him.
+
+"I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall have
+her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is coming on.
+Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a hundred thousand
+livres a year with which to amuse himself."
+
+Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
+Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been less
+acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the prospect of a
+hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor was he that for half
+that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own daughter to wife, without
+stopping to consider the disadvantages it might entail.
+
+The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of 1609.
+Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last precisely
+what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against it, but the
+Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by Concino Concini
+and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious adventurers who had come
+from Florence in her train, and who saw in the King's weakness their own
+opportunity.
+
+The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the relations
+between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to breaking-point.
+And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own making was growing about
+him until it threatened to overwhelm him, he received a letter from
+Vaucelas, his ambassador at Madrid, containing revelations that changed
+his annoyance into stark apprehension.
+
+When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving all the
+world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor had stepped in,
+and over-riding the rights of certain German princes had bestowed
+the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke Leopold. Now this was an
+arrangement that did not suit Henry's policy at all, and being then--as
+the result of a wise husbanding of resources--the most powerful prince
+in Europe, Henry was not likely to submit tamely to arrangements that
+did not suit him. His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the
+difference between France and the House of Austria arising out of
+this matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
+Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one day be
+united with France; and it was partly to support this claim that he was
+now disposed to attach the German princes to his interests.
+
+Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents at the
+court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine ambassador, acting
+upon instructions from certain members of the household of the Queen of
+France, and from others whom Vaucelas said he dared not mention, were
+intriguing to blast Henry's designs against the house of Austria, and to
+bring him willy-nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so
+far in their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
+the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a marriage
+between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
+
+That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal, where
+Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien de Bethune,
+Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he was his closest
+friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King leaned upon him and
+sought his guidance not only in State affairs, but in the most intimate
+and domestic matters. Often already had it fallen to Sully to patch up
+the differences created between husband and wife by Henry's persistent
+infidelities.
+
+The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of the
+closet in which the duke--but newly risen--received him in bed-gown and
+night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came abruptly to the matter.
+
+"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood with
+his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a little
+above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune in jerkin and
+long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a wine-coloured ostrich
+plume. His countenance matched his raiment. Keeneyed, broad of brow,
+with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red lips, a tuft of beard and
+a pair of grizzled, bristling moustachios, he looked half-hero,
+half-satyr; half-Captain, half-Polichinelle.
+
+Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and dignity,
+despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering his high, bald
+crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
+
+"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he, and
+gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me with
+apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than from any
+former attachment of yours."
+
+"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was almost
+sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated. It is the work
+of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no respect for me, at
+least he might consider how he slanders a child of such grace and wit
+and beauty, a lady of her high birth and noble lineage."
+
+There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not missed
+by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window, and flung into a
+chair.
+
+"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her to
+take violent resolutions which might give colour to their pernicious
+designs."
+
+"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.
+
+Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked forth
+the letter from Vaucelas.
+
+"Read that."
+
+Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated: "They
+must be mad!"
+
+"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly sane,
+which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What do you infer,
+Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against resolutions from which
+they know that nothing can turn me while I have life?"
+
+"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.
+
+"In acting thus--in daring to act thus," the King expounded, "they
+proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to live."
+
+"Sire!"
+
+"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am dead."
+
+Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied silence, his
+loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery the truth that he
+perceived.
+
+"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take your
+measures."
+
+"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare not
+name? Can you suggest another than..." He paused, shrinking in horror
+from completing the utterance of his thought. Then, with an abrupt
+gesture, he went on, "... than the Queen herself?"
+
+Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He took his
+chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
+
+"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have exasperated
+her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon the
+councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an attachment of
+yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen, but never such trouble
+as I have been foreseeing from your attachment to the Princess of Conde.
+Sire, will you not consider where you stand?"
+
+"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the uncompromising
+gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended, "they are gross
+exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend, that I am sick with love
+of her. Day and night I see nothing but her gracious image. I sigh and
+fret and fume like any callow lad of twenty. I suffer the tortures of
+the damned. And yet... and yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb
+this passion though it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they
+consume my soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm
+has come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the
+inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how far
+he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the Queen to eat
+nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they have set up for her
+in their own apartments. What can you conclude from that but that they
+suggest that I desire to poison her?"
+
+"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair packing back
+to Florence, and so be rid of them."
+
+Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I have a
+mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it, Sully. Disabuse
+her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess of Conde; make my
+peace with her; convince her of my sincerity, of my firm intention
+to have done with gallantry, so that she on her side will make me the
+sacrifice of banishing the Concinis. You will do this, my friend?"
+
+It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past experience,
+and the task was one in which he was by now well-practiced; but the
+situation had never before been quite so difficult. He rose.
+
+"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may require
+something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may reopen the
+question of her coronation so long and--in her view--so unreasonably
+postponed."
+
+Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an
+instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and this
+instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me. If she will
+dare so much, having so little real power, what might she not do if..."
+He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she demands it we must yield,
+I suppose," he said at length. "But give her to understand that if I
+discover any more of her designs with Spain I shall be provoked to the
+last degree against her. And as an antidote to these machinations at
+Madrid you may publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German
+Princes in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
+arming to that end."
+
+He may have thought--as was long afterwards alleged--that the threat
+itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no power in
+Europe that could have stood against his armies in the field.
+
+On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that Henry
+should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
+
+"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and respect
+the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte solely so that I
+might impose silence upon my own passion."
+
+And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have relied
+absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy it is for a
+heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive itself"--which is
+the most amiable conceivable way of saying that he attached not the
+slightest faith to the King's promise.
+
+Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between the
+royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had taught him;
+and he might have driven a good bargain on his master's behalf but for
+his master's own weakness in supporting him. Maria de' Medici would
+not hear of the banishment of the Concinis, to whom she was so deeply
+attached. She insisted with perfect justice that she was a bitterly
+injured woman, and refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save
+with the condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
+France--which was no more than her due--should be made at once, and that
+the King should give an undertaking not to make himself ridiculous any
+longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of the matters contained
+in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all knowledge, nor would suffer any
+further inquisition.
+
+From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory. But he
+yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged her so much
+in one way that he must make some compensating concessions to her in
+another. This weakness was part of his mental attitude towards her,
+which swung constantly between confidence and diffidence, esteem and
+indifference, affection and coldness; at times he inclined to put her
+from him entirely; at others he opined that no one on his Council was
+more capable of the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation
+aroused by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not
+to admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
+reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
+Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was not
+sincere in the intention.
+
+By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's judgment. The
+court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of Henry's prudence was
+battered down by the vanity of that lovely fool, Charlotte, who must be
+encouraging her royal lover to resume his flattering homage. But both
+appear to have reckoned without the lady's husband.
+
+Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of eighteen thousand
+livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont au Change; and
+you conceive what the charitable ladies of the Court had to say about
+it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur de Conde put himself into
+a fine heat, and said things which pained and annoyed the King
+exceedingly. Henry had amassed a considerable and varied experience
+of jealous husbands in his time; but he had never met one quite so
+intolerable as this nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to
+Sully.
+
+"My friend,--Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
+possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of me. I
+shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile I am obliged
+to talk to him with severity."
+
+More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to withhold
+payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance, and to give
+refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he intended also, no
+doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did not receive a pension of a
+hundred thousand livres a year for nothing.
+
+"If this does not keep him in bounds," Henry concluded, "we must think
+of some other method, for he says the most injurious things of me."
+
+So little did it keep the prince in bounds--as Henry understood the
+phrase--that he immediately packed his belongings, and carried his wife
+off to his country house. It was quite in vain that Henry wrote to him
+representing that this conduct was dishonouring to them both, and that
+the only place for a prince of the blood was the court of his sovereign.
+
+The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took to
+night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the disguise of
+a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre, whose will was
+law in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges, ankle-deep in wet grass,
+spending long hours in love-lore, ecstatic contemplation of her lighted
+window, and all--so far as we can gather--for no other result than the
+aggravation of certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him
+that he was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.
+
+But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded. Henry had
+been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he strayed from the
+path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw to that. And when they
+judged the season ripe, they put her Majesty in possession of the facts.
+So inflamed was she by this fresh breach of trust that war was declared
+anew between the royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours
+could now accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
+
+And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde took
+the desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife, without
+troubling--as was his duty--to obtain the King's consent. On the last
+night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the Louvre, the Chevalier
+du Guet brought him the news of the prince's flight.
+
+"I never in my life," says Bassompierre, who was present, "saw a man so
+distracted or in so violent a passion."
+
+He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing over
+behind him. "I am undone!" was his cry. "Undone! This madman has carried
+off his wife--perhaps to kill her." White and shaking, he turned to
+Bassompierre. "Take care of my money," he bade him, "and go on with the
+game."
+
+He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the Arsenal to
+fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came at once, but in an
+extremely bad temper, for it was late at night, and he was overburdened
+with work.
+
+He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and forward,
+his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind him. The Queen,
+a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart, attended by a few of
+her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her train. Her countenance was
+set and inscrutable, and her brooding eyes were fixed upon the King.
+
+"Ha, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and strained.
+"What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"
+
+"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was excited.
+
+"Nothing! What sort of advice is that?"
+
+"The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be talked
+of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of any consequence
+to you, or capable of giving you the least uneasiness."
+
+The Queen cleared her throat huskily. "Good advice, Monsieur le Duc,"
+she approved him. "He will be wise to follow it." Her voice strained,
+almost threatening. "But, in this matter, I doubt wisdom and he have
+long since become strangers."
+
+That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
+maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and with a
+patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in pursuit of
+the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the road to Landrecy,
+which was enough for him. Stage by stage he followed them in that flight
+to Flanders, picking up the trail as he went, and never pausing until he
+had reached the frontier without overtaking them.
+
+It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it, shed
+tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned letters in
+which she addressed him as her knight, and implored him, as he loved
+her, to come and deliver her from the detestable tyrant who held her in
+thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed his undoing, drove him mad,
+and blinded him to everything--even to the fact that his wife, too, was
+shedding tears, and that these were of rage undiluted by any more tender
+emotion.
+
+He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the Prince
+of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke declined with
+dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law of nations, Henry
+dispatched Coeuvres secretly to Brussels to carry off thence the
+princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the alert, and frustrated the
+design by sending a warning of what was intended to the Marquis Spinola,
+as a result of which the Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for
+greater security in the Archduke's own palace.
+
+Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which he
+continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses, Henry took
+the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade the Low Countries
+as the first step in the execution of that design of a war with Spain
+which hitherto had been little more than a presence. The matter of the
+Duchy of Cleves was a pretext ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he
+desired he would set Europe in a blaze.
+
+He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the new year,
+and in the months that followed France rang with preparations. It rang,
+too, with other things which should have given him pause. It rang with
+the voice of preachers giving expression to the popular view; that
+Cleves was not worth fighting for, that the war was unrighteous--a war
+undertaken by Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against the
+very champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring too,
+with prophecies of the King's approaching end.
+
+These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin, and the
+astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the stars that May
+would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome--from the very pope
+himself came notice of a conspiracy against him in which he was told
+that the very highest in the land were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne,
+and Douai came messages of like purport, and early in May a note was
+found one morning on the altar of the church of Montargis announcing the
+King's approaching death.
+
+But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his preparations
+undeterred by either warnings or prognostications. There had been so
+many conspiracies against his life already that he was become careless
+and indifferent in such matters. Yet surely there never had been one
+that was so abundantly heralded from every quarter, or ever one that
+was hatched under conditions so propitious as those which he had himself
+created now. In his soul he was not at ease, and the source of his
+uneasiness was the coronation of the Queen, for which the preparations
+were now going forward.
+
+He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him from
+any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose influence with the
+Queen was almost such as to give them a control over her--the Concinis
+and their unavowed but obvious ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were
+dead, and the Queen so left that she could be made absolute regent
+during the Dauphin's minority, it was those adventurers who would become
+through her the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and
+gratify to the full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that his
+safety lay in opposing this coronation--already fixed for the 13th
+May--which Maria de' Medici was so insistent should take place before
+his departure for the wars. The matter so preyed upon his mind that last
+he unburdened himself to Sully one day at the Arsenal.
+
+"Oh, my friend," he cried, "this coronation does not please me. My heart
+tells me that some fatality will follow."
+
+He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully could
+only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained awhile in
+deep thought. Then he started up again.
+
+"Pardieu!" he cried. "I shall be murdered in this city. It is their only
+resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation will be the cause of
+my death."
+
+"What a thought, sir!"
+
+"You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed to the
+prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master." And wrinkles deepened
+about the bold, piercing eyes. "It is four months and more since we
+announced our intention of going to war, and France has resounded with
+our preparations. We have made no secret of it. Yet in Spain not a
+finger has been lifted in preparation to resist us, not a sword has been
+sharpened. Upon what does Spain build? Whence her confidence that in
+despite of my firm resolve and my abundant preparations, despite the
+fact announced that I am to march on the last of this month, despite the
+fact that my troops are already in Champagne with a train of artillery
+so complete and well-furnished that France has never seen the like of
+it, and perhaps never will again--whence the confidence that despite all
+this there is no need to prepare defences? Upon what do they build, I
+say, when they assume, as assume they must, that there will be no war?
+Resolve me that, Grand Master."
+
+But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
+
+"You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain builds on
+my death. And who are the friends of Spain here in France? Who was it
+intrigued with Spain in such a way and to such ends as in my lifetime
+could never have been carried to an issue? Ha! You see."
+
+"I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!" cried that
+loyal, honest gentleman. "And yet if you are convinced of it, you should
+break off this coronation, your journey, and your war. If you wish it
+so, it is not difficult to satisfy you."
+
+"Ay, that is it." He came to his feet, and gripped the duke's shoulder
+in his strong, nervous hand. "Break off this coronation, and never
+let me hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can rid my mind of
+apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to fear."
+
+"Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis, to stop
+the preparations and dismiss the workmen."
+
+"Ah, wait." The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new hope, grew
+dull again; the lines of care descended between the brows. "Oh, what to
+decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my friend. But how will my
+wife take it?"
+
+"Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will continue
+obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of disaster."
+
+"Perhaps not, perhaps not," he answered. But his tone was not sanguine.
+"Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I cannot do this thing.
+But you will know how to persuade her. Go to her."
+
+Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought the
+Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties, and
+arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was labour lost.
+Maria de' Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's arguments she
+opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
+
+Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute right, she
+would be a person of no account and subject to the Council of Regency
+during the King's absence, a position unworthy and intolerable to her,
+the mother of the Dauphin.
+
+And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the wrongs
+that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was doing her by
+this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged. He had chanced one
+day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought of this war.
+
+"Those who have the best information," the Nuncio answered boldly,
+"are of opinion that the principal object of the war is the Princess of
+Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to France."
+
+Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an
+impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
+
+"Yes, by God!" he cried. "Yes--most certainly I want to have her
+back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even God's
+viceregent on earth."
+
+Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to the
+Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than anything that
+had yet happened in this affair, his conscience left him, despite his
+fears, powerless now to thwart her even to the extent of removing those
+pernicious familiars of hers of whose plottings he had all but positive
+evidence.
+
+And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
+magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been
+concerted that the festivities should last four days and conclude on the
+Sunday with the Queen's public entry into Paris. On the Monday the
+King was to set out to take command of his armies, which were already
+marching upon the frontiers.
+
+Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen--convinced by his own admission of
+the real aim and object of the war, and driven by outraged pride to hate
+the man who offered her this crowning insult, and determined that at
+all costs it must be thwarted--had lent an ear to Concini's purpose to
+avenge her, and was ready to repay infidelity with infidelity. Concini
+and his fellow-conspirators had gone to work so confidently that a week
+before the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege, announcing
+that he was going with news of Henry's assassination to the Princes of
+Germany, whilst at the same time accounts of the King's death were being
+published in France and Italy.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
+outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his wife's
+coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony by the title
+of "Madam Regent."
+
+The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience. For
+that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and when he
+sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him of a dream
+in which she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring him with a
+tenderness such as had been utterly foreign to her of late to take great
+care of himself in the days to come. In the morning she renewed those
+entreaties, beseeching him not to leave the Louvre that day, urging that
+she had a premonition it would be fatal to him.
+
+He laughed for answer. "You have heard of the predictions of La Brosse,"
+said he. "Bah! You should not attach credit to such nonsense."
+
+Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
+Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to receive a
+like answer.
+
+Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night's broken rest,
+Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him, he rose,
+pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out into the
+courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he casually asked the
+time, observing the King's pallor and listlessness, took the liberty of
+suggesting that his Majesty might benefit if he took the air.
+
+That chance remark decided Henry's fate. His eyes quickened
+responsively. "You advise well," said he. "Order my coach. I will go to
+the Arsenal to see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed."
+
+On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await their
+masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in a dingy,
+clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that he had once been
+arrested on no better grounds than because it was deemed impossible that
+a man with such a face could be other than a villain.
+
+Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the Louvre, and
+startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With fearful insistence
+she besought him to countermand the order, and not to leave the palace.
+
+"I will but go there and back," he said, laughing at her fears. "I shall
+have returned before you realize that I have gone." And so he went,
+never to return alive.
+
+He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all the
+curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations of the city
+against the Queen's public entry on Sunday. The Duc d'Epernon was on
+his right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis de la Force on his left.
+Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the right boot, whilst near the left
+boot, opposite to Henry, sat Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He was
+attended only by a small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some
+footmen.
+
+The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de la
+Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block occasioned by
+the meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the other with wine. The
+footmen went ahead with the exception of two. Of these, one advanced to
+clear a way for the royal vehicle, whilst the other took the opportunity
+to fasten his garter.
+
+At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the shops,
+came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on the stones
+outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by deliberately standing
+upon one of the spokes of the stationary wheel, he leaned over the Duc
+d'Epernon, and, whipping a long, stout knife from his sleeve, stabbed
+Henry in the breast. The King, who was in the act of reading a letter,
+cried out, and threw up his arms in an instinctive warding movement,
+thereby exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and this time
+the blade went deep.
+
+With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood gushed from
+his mouth.
+
+The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier riding
+through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the stories of his death
+already at that very hour circulating in Antwerp, Malines, Brussels, and
+elsewhere.
+
+The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried by
+Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and stood
+there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself of the
+incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King's gentlemen-in-waiting,
+who had followed the coach, whipped out his sword and would have slain
+him on the spot had he not been restrained by Epernon. The footmen
+seized the fellow, and delivered him over to the captain of the guard.
+He proved to be a school-master of Angouleme--which was Epernon's
+country. His name was Ravaillac.
+
+The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about, and
+driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it was
+announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
+
+But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife that
+had stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to Henry's loyal
+and devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge exactly whence the blow
+had proceeded. With anger and grief in his heart he got to horse, ill
+as he was, and, calling together his people, set out presently for the
+Louvre, with a train one hundred strong, which was presently increased
+to twice that number by many of the King's faithful servants who joined
+his company as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in
+passing slipped a note into his hand.
+
+It was a brief scrawl: "Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done. I have
+seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape any more than
+he did."
+
+Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a gentleman
+named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
+
+"Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself, for this
+strange blow will have fearful consequences."
+
+Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose contents
+were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings mounting swiftly
+to certainty, Sully rode amain towards the Louvre, his train by now
+amounting to some three hundred horse. But at the end of the street he
+was stopped by M. de Vitry, who drew rein as they met.
+
+"Ah, monsieur," Vitry greeted him, "where are you going with such a
+following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with more than
+two or three attendants, which I would not advise you to do. For this
+plot does not end here. I have seen some persons so little sensible of
+the loss they have sustained that they cannot even simulate the grief
+they should feel. Go back, monsieur. There is enough for you to do
+without going to the Louvre."
+
+Persuaded by Vitry's solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart, Sully
+faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently he was
+overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to come at once
+to her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as possible with him.
+"This proposal," he writes, "to go alone and deliver myself into the
+hands of my enemies, who filled the Louvre, was not calculated to allay
+my suspicions."
+
+Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the guards
+and a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the Arsenal, that
+others had been sent to the Temple, where the powder was stored, and
+others again to the treasurer of the Exchequer to stop all the money
+there.
+
+"Convey to the Queen my duty and service," he bade the messenger, "and
+assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I shall continue
+assiduously to attend the affairs of my office." And with that he went
+to shut himself up in the Bastille, whither he was presently followed
+by a stream of her Majesty's envoys, all bidding him to the Louvre.
+But Sully, ill as he was, and now utterly prostrated by all that he had
+endured, put himself to bed and made of his indisposition a sufficient
+excuse.
+
+Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her
+summons, receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for any
+apprehensions. Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain security in
+the esteem in which the Parisians held him. An attempt against him in
+the Louvre itself would prove that the blow that had killed his master
+was not the independent act of a fanatic, as it was being represented;
+and vengeance would follow swiftly upon the heads of those who would
+thus betray themselves of having made of that poor wretch's fanaticism
+an instrument to their evil ends.
+
+In that assurance he went, and he has left on record the burning
+indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction, complacency,
+and even mirth that he discovered in that house of death. The
+Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and perhaps
+conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh hour she had
+sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully, and brought in the
+Dauphin, who flung himself upon the Duke's neck.
+
+"My son," the Queen addressed him, "this is Monsieur de Sully. You must
+love him well, for he was one of the best and most faithful servants of
+the King your father, and I entreat him to continue to serve you in the
+same manner."
+
+Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his
+suspicions were unworthy. But, even then, the sequel would very quickly
+have undeceived him. For very soon thereafter his fall was brought about
+by the Concinis and their creatures, so that no obstacle should remain
+between themselves and the full gratification of their fell ambitions.
+
+At once he saw the whole policy of the dead King subversed; he saw the
+renouncing of all ancient alliances, and the union of the crowns
+of France and Spain; the repealing of all acts of pacification; the
+destruction of the Protestants; the dissipation of the treasures amassed
+by Henry; the disgrace of those who would not receive the yoke of the
+new favourites. All this Sully witnessed in his declining years, and he
+witnessed, too, the rapid rise to the greatest power and dignity in the
+State of that Florentine adventurer, Concino Concini--now bearing the
+title of Marshal d'Ancre--who had so cunningly known how to profit by a
+Queen's jealousy and a King's indiscretions.
+
+As for the miserable Ravaillac, it is pretended that he maintained under
+torture and to the very hour of his death that he had no accomplices,
+that what he had done he had done to prevent an unrighteous war against
+Catholicism and the Pope--which was, no doubt, the falsehood with which
+those who used him played upon his fanaticism and whetted him to their
+service. I say "pretended" because, after all, complete records of his
+examinations are not discoverable, and there is a story that when at the
+point of death, seeing himself abandoned by those in whom perhaps he had
+trusted, he signified a desire to confess, and did so confess; but the
+notary Voisin, who took his depositions in articulo mortis, set them
+down in a hand so slovenly as to be afterwards undecipherable.
+
+That may or may not be true. But the statement that when the President
+du Harlay sought to pursue inquiries into certain allegations by a woman
+named d'Escoman, which incriminated the Duc d'Epernon, he received a
+royal order to desist, rests upon sound authority.
+
+That is the story of the assassination of Henry IV. re-told in the
+light of certain records which appear to me to have been insufficiently
+studied. They should suggest a train of speculation leading to
+inferences which, whilst obvious, I hesitate to define absolutely.
+
+"If it be asked," says Perefixe, "who were the friends that suggested to
+Ravaillac so damnable a design, history replies that it is ignorant and
+that upon an action of such consequences it is not permissible to give
+suspicions and conjectures for certain truths. The judges themselves who
+interrogated him dared not open their mouths, and never mentioned the
+matter but with gestures of horror and amazement."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+
+The Murder of Amy Robsart
+
+There had been a banquet, followed by a masque, and this again by a
+dance in which the young queen had paired off with Lord Robert Dudley,
+who in repute was the handsomest man in Europe, just as in fact he was
+the vainest, shallowest, and most unscrupulous. There had been homage
+and flattery lavishly expressed, and there was a hint of masked
+hostility from certain quarters to spice the adventure, and to thrill
+her bold young spirit. Never yet in all the months of her reign since
+her coronation in January of last year had she felt so much a queen, and
+so conscious of the power of her high estate; never so much a woman,
+and so conscious of the weakness of her sex. The interaction of those
+conflicting senses wrought upon her like a heady wine. She leaned more
+heavily upon the silken arm of her handsome Master of the Horse, and
+careless in her intoxication of what might be thought or said, she--who
+by the intimate favour shown him had already loosed the tongue of
+Scandal and set it chattering in every court in Europe--drew him forth
+from that thronged and glittering chamber of the Palace of Whitehall
+into the outer solitude and friendly gloom.
+
+And he, nothing loth to obey the suasion of that white hand upon his
+arm, exultant, indeed, to parade before them all the power he had with
+her, went willingly enough. Let Norfolk and Sussex scowl, let Arundel
+bite his lip until it bled, and sober Cecil stare cold disapproval. They
+should mend their countenances soon, and weigh their words or be for
+ever silenced, when he was master in England. And that he would soon be
+master he was assured to-night by every glance of her blue eyes, by the
+pressure of that fair hand upon his arm, by the languishing abandonment
+with which that warm young body swayed towards him, as they passed out
+from the blaze of lights and the strains of music into the gloom and
+silence of the gallery leading to the terrace.
+
+"Out--let us go out, Robin. Let me have air," she almost panted, as she
+drew him on.
+
+Assuredly he would be master soon. Indeed, he might have been master
+already but for that wife of his, that stumbling-block to his ambition,
+who practiced the housewifely virtues at Cumnor Place, and clung so
+tenaciously and so inconsiderately to life in spite of all his plans to
+relieve her of the burden of it.
+
+For a year and more his name had been coupled with the Queen's in a
+tale that hurt her honour as a woman and imperilled her dignity as a
+sovereign. Already in October of 1559 Alvarez de Quadra, the Spanish
+ambassador, had written home: "I have learnt certain things as to the
+terms on which the Queen and Lord Robert stand towards each other which
+I could not have believed."
+
+That was at a time when de Quadra was one of a dozen ambassadors who
+were competing for her hand, and Lord Robert had, himself, appeared to
+be an ally of de Quadra and an advocate of the Spanish marriage with the
+Archduke Charles. But it was a presence which nowise deceived the astute
+Spaniard, who employed a legion of spies to keep him well informed.
+
+"All the dallying with us," he wrote, "all the dallying with the Swede,
+all the dallying there will be with the rest, one after another, is
+merely to keep Lord Robert's enemies in play until his villainy about
+his wife can be executed."
+
+What that particular villainy was, the ambassador had already stated
+earlier in his letter. "I have learnt from a person who usually gives me
+true information that Lord Robert has sent to have his wife poisoned."
+
+What had actually happened was that Sir Richard Verney--a trusted
+retainer of Lord Robert's--had reported to Dr. Bayley, of New College,
+Oxford, that Lady Robert Dudley was "sad and ailing," and had asked him
+for a potion. But the doctor was learned in more matters than physic. He
+had caught an echo of the tale of Lord Robert's ambition; he had heard
+a whisper that whatever suitors might come from overseas for Elizabeth,
+she would marry none but "my lord"--as Lord Robert was now commonly
+styled. More, he had aforetime heard rumours of the indispositions of
+Lady Robert, yet had never found those rumours verified by the fact.
+Some months ago, it had been reported that her ladyship was suffering
+from cancer of the breast and likely soon to die of it. Yet Dr. Bayley
+had reason to know that a healthier woman did not live in Berkshire.
+
+The good doctor was a capable deductive reasoner, and the conclusion
+to which he came was that if they poisoned her under cover of his
+potion--she standing in no need of physic--he might afterwards be
+hanged as a cover for their crime. So he refused to prescribe as he was
+invited, nor troubled to make a secret of invitation and refusal.
+
+For awhile, then, Lord Robert had prudently held his hand; moreover,
+the urgency there had been a year ago, when that host of foreign suitors
+laid siege to Elizabeth of England, had passed, and his lordship could
+afford to wait. But now of a sudden the urgency was returned. Under the
+pressure brought to bear upon her to choose a husband, Elizabeth had
+half-committed herself to marry the Archduke Charles, promising the
+Spanish ambassador a definite answer within a few days.
+
+Lord Robert had felt the earth to be quaking under him; he had seen
+the ruin of his high ambitions; he had watched with rage the expanding
+mockery upon the countenances of Norfolk, Sussex, and those others who
+hated and despised him; and he had cursed that wife of his who knew not
+when to die. But for that obstinacy with which she clung to life he had
+been the Queen's husband these many months, so making an end to suspense
+and to the danger that lies in delay.
+
+To-night the wantonness with which the Queen flaunted before the eyes of
+all her court the predilection in which she held him, came not merely to
+lull his recent doubts and fears, to feed his egregious vanity, and to
+assure him that in her heart he need fear no rival; it came also to
+set his soul Quiver impotent rage. He had but to put forth his hands
+to possess himself of this splendid prize. Yet those hands of his were
+bound while that woman lived at Cumnor. Conceive his feelings as they
+stole away together like any pair of lovers.
+
+Arm in arm they came by a stone gallery, where a stalwart scarlet
+sentinel, a yeoman of the guard, with a Tudor rose embroidered in gold
+upon his back, stood under a lamp set in the wall, with grounded pike
+and body stiffly erect.
+
+The tall young Queen was in crimson satin with cunningly-wrought silver
+embroideries, trimmed with tufted silver fringe, her stomacher stiff
+with silver bullion studded with gold rosettes and Roman pearls, her
+bodice cut low to display her splendid neck, decked by a carcanet of
+pearls and rubies, and surmounted by a fan-like cuff of guipure, high
+behind and sloping towards the bust. Thus she appeared to the sentinel
+as the rays of the single lamp behind him struck fire from her red-gold
+hair. As if by her very gait to express the wantonness of her mood, she
+pointed her toes and walked with head thrown back, smiling up into
+the gipsy face of her companion, who was arrayed from head to foot in
+shimmering ivory satin, with an elegance no man in England could have
+matched.
+
+They came by that stone gallery to a little terrace above the Privy
+Steps. A crescent moon hung low over the Lambeth marshes across the
+river. From a barge that floated gay with lights in mid-stream came
+a tinkle of lutes, and the sweet voice of a singing boy. A moment
+the lovers stood at gaze, entranced by the beauty of the soft, tepid
+September night, so subtly adapted to their mood. Then she fetched a
+sigh, and hung more heavily upon his arm, leaned nearer to his tall,
+vigorous, graceful figure.
+
+"Robin, Robin!" was all she said, but in her voice throbbed a world of
+passionate longing, an exquisite blend of delight and pain.
+
+Judging the season ripe, his arm flashed round her, and drew her
+fiercely close. For a moment she was content to yield, her head against
+his stalwart shoulder, a very woman nestling to the mate of her choice,
+surrendering to her master. Then the queen in her awoke and strangled
+nature. Roughly she disengaged herself from his arm, and stood away, her
+breathing quickened.
+
+"God's Death, Robin!" There was a harsh note in the voice that lately
+had cooed so softly. "You are strangely free, I think."
+
+But he, impudence incarnate, nothing abashed, accustomed to her
+gusty moods, to her alternations between the two natures she had
+inherited--from overbearing father and wanton mother--was determined at
+all costs to take the fullest advantage of the hour, to make an end of
+suspense.
+
+"I am not free, but enslaved--by love and worship of you. Would you deny
+me; Would you?"
+
+"Not I, but fate," she answered heavily, and he knew that the woman at
+Cumnor was in her mind.
+
+"Fate will soon mend the wrong that fate has done--very soon now." He
+took her hand, and, melted again from her dignity, she let it lie in
+his. "When that is done, sweet, then will I claim you for my own."
+
+"When that is done, Robin?" she questioned almost fearfully, as if a
+sudden dread suspicion broke upon her mind. "When what is done?"
+
+He paused a moment to choose his words, what time she stared intently
+into the face that gleamed white in the surrounding gloom.
+
+"When that poor ailing spirit is at rest." And he added: "It will be
+soon."
+
+"Thou hast said the same aforetime, Robin. Yet it has not so fallen
+out."
+
+"She has clung to life beyond what could have been believed of her
+condition," he explained, unconscious of any sinister ambiguity. "But
+the end, I know, is very near--a matter but of days."
+
+"Of days!" she shivered, and moved forward to the edge of the terrace,
+he keeping step beside her. Then she stood awhile in silence, looking
+down at the dark oily surge of water. "You loved her once, Robin?" she
+asked, in a queer, unnatural voice.
+
+"I never loved but once," answered that perfect courtier.
+
+"Yet you married her--men say it was a love marriage. It was a marriage,
+anyway, and you can speak so calmly of her death?" Her tone was
+brooding. She sought understanding that should silence her own lingering
+doubt of him.
+
+"Where lies the blame? Who made me what I am?" Again his bold arm
+encompassed her. Side by side they peered down through the gloom at the
+rushing waters, and he seized an image from them. "Our love is like that
+seething tide," he said. "To resist it is to labour in agony awhile, and
+then to perish."
+
+"And to yield is to be swept away."
+
+"To happiness," he cried, and reverted to his earlier prayer. "Say
+that when... that afterwards, I may claim you for my own. Be true to
+yourself, obey the voice of instinct, and so win to happiness."
+
+She looked up at him, seeking to scan the handsome face in that dim
+light that baffled her, and he observed the tumultuous heave of her
+white breast.
+
+"Can I trust thee, Robin? Can I trust thee? Answer me true!" she
+implored him, adorably weak, entirely woman now.
+
+"What does your own heart answer you?" quoth he, loaning close above
+her.
+
+"I think I can, Robin. And, anyway, I must. I cannot help myself. I am
+but a woman, after all," she murmured, and sighed. "Be it as thou wilt.
+Come to me again when thou art free."
+
+He bent lower, murmuring incoherently, and she put up a hand to pat his
+swarthy bearded cheek.
+
+"I shall make thee greater than any man in England, so thou make me
+happier than any woman."
+
+He caught the hand in his and kissed it passionately, his soul singing
+a triumph song within him. Norfolk and Sussex and those other scowling
+ones should soon be whistled to the master's heel.
+
+As they turned arm in arm into the gallery to retrace their steps,
+they came suddenly face to face with a slim, sleek gentleman, who bowed
+profoundly, a smile upon his crafty, shaven, priestly face. In a smooth
+voice and an accent markedly foreign, he explained that he, too, sought
+the cool of the terrace, not thinking to intrude; and upon that, bowing
+again, he passed on and effaced himself. It was Alvarez de Quadra,
+Bishop of Aquila, the argus-eyed ambassador of Spain.
+
+The young face of the Queen hardened.
+
+"I would I were as well served abroad as the King of Spain is here,"
+she said aloud, that the retreating ambassador might hear the dubious
+compliment; and for my lord's ear alone she added under her breath: "The
+spy! Philip of Spain will hear of this."
+
+"So that he hears something more, what shall it signify?" quoth my lord,
+and laughed.
+
+They paced the length of the gallery in silence, past the yeoman of the
+guard, who kept his watch, and into the first antechamber. Perhaps it
+was that meeting with de Quadra and my lord's answer to her comment that
+prompted what now she asked: "What is it ails her, Robin?"
+
+"A wasting sickness," he answered, never doubting to whom the question
+alluded.
+
+"You said, I think, that... that the end is very near."
+
+He caught her meaning instantly. "Indeed, if she is not dead already,
+she is very nearly so."
+
+He lied, for never had Amy Dudley been in better health. And yet he
+spoke the truth, for in so much as her life depended upon his will,
+it was as good as spent. This was, he knew, a decisive moment of his
+career. The hour was big with fate. If now he were weak or hesitant, the
+chance might slip away and be for ever lost to him. Elizabeth's moods
+were as uncertain as were certain the hostile activities of my lord's
+enemies. He must strike quickly whilst she was in her present frame of
+mind, and bring her to wedlock, be it in public or in private. But first
+he must shake off the paralysing encumbrance of that house-wife down at
+Cumnor.
+
+I believe--from evidence that I account abundant--that he considered
+it with the cold remorselessness of the monstrous egotist he was. An
+upstart, great-grandson to a carpenter, noble only in two descents, and
+in both of them stained by the block, he found a queen--the victim of
+a physical passion that took no account of the worthlessness underlying
+his splendid exterior--reaching out a hand to raise him to a throne.
+Being what he was, he weighed his young wife's life at naught in the
+evil scales of his ambition. And yet he had loved her once, more truly
+perhaps than he could now pretend to love the Queen.
+
+It was some ten years since, as a lad of eighteen, he had taken Sir
+John Robsart's nineteen-year-old daughter to wife. She had brought him
+considerable wealth and still more devotion. Because of this devotion
+she was content to spend her days at Cumnor, whilst he ruffled it at
+court; content to take such crumbs of attention as he could spare her
+upon occasion. And during the past year, whilst he had been plotting her
+death, she had been diligently caring for his interests and fostering
+the prosperity of the Berkshire estate. If he thought of this at all, he
+allowed no weakly sentiment to turn him from his purpose. There was too
+much at stake for that--a throne, no less.
+
+And so, on the morning after that half-surrender of Elizabeth's, we
+find my lord closeted with his henchman, Sir Richard Verney. Sir
+Richard--like his master--was a greedy, unscrupulous, ambitious
+scoundrel, prepared to go to any lengths for the sake of such worldly
+advancement as it lay in my lord's power to give him. My lord perforce
+used perfect frankness with this perfect servant.
+
+"Thou'lt rise or fall with me, Dick," quoth he. "Help me up, then, and
+so mount with me. When I am King, as soon now I shall be, look to me.
+Now to the thing that is to do. Thou'lt have guessed it."
+
+To Sir Richard it was an easy guess, considering how much already he had
+been about this business. He signified as much.
+
+My lord shifted in his elbow-chair, and drew his embroidered bedgown of
+yellow satin closer about his shapely limbs.
+
+"Hast failed me twice before, Richard," said he. "God's death, man, fail
+me not again, or the last chance may go the way of the others. There's a
+magic in the number three. See that I profit by it, or I am undone, and
+thou with me."
+
+"I'd not have failed before, but for that suspicious dotard Bayley,"
+grumbled Verney. "Your lordship bade me see that all was covered."
+
+"Aye, aye. And I bid thee so again. On thy life, leave no footprints
+by which we may be tracked. Bayley is not the only physician in Oxford.
+About it, then, and swiftly. Time is the very soul of fortune in this
+business, with the Spaniard straining at the leash, and Cecil and the
+rest pleading his case with her. Succeed, and thy fortune's made; fail,
+and trouble not to seek me again."
+
+Sir Richard bowed, and took his leave. As he reached the door, his
+lordship stayed him. "If thou bungle, do not look to me. The court goes
+to Windsor to-morrow. Bring me word there within the week." He rose,
+magnificently tall and stately, in his bedgown of embroidered yellow
+satin, his handsome head thrown back, and went after his retainer.
+"Thou'lt not fail me, Dick," said he, a hand upon the lesser scoundrel's
+shoulder. "There is much at issue for me, and for thee with me."
+
+"I will not fail you, my lord," Sir Richard rashly promised, and on that
+they parted.
+
+Sir Richard did not mean to fail. He knew the importance of succeeding,
+and he appreciated the urgency of the business as much as did my lord
+himself. But between his cold, remorseless will to succeed and success
+itself there lay a gulf which it needed all his resource to bridge.
+He paid a short visit to Lady Robert at Cumnor, and professed deepest
+concern to find in her a pallor and an ailing air which no one else had
+yet observed. He expressed himself on the subject to Mrs. Buttelar and
+the other members of her ladyship's household, reproaching them with
+their lack of care of their mistress. Mrs. Buttelar became indignant
+under his reproaches.
+
+"Nay, now, Sir Richard, do you wonder that my lady is sad and downcast
+with such tales as are going of my lord's doings at court, and of what
+there is 'twixt the Queen and him? Her ladyship may be too proud to
+complain, but she suffers the more for that, poor lamb. There was talk
+of a divorce awhile ago that got to her ears."
+
+"Old wives' tales," snorted Sir Richard.
+
+"Likely," agreed Mrs. Buttelar. "Yet when my lord neither comes to
+Cumnor, nor requires her ladyship to go to him, what is she to think,
+poor soul?"
+
+Sir Richard made light of all, and went off to Oxford to find a
+physician more accommodating than Dr. Bayley. But Dr. Bayley had talked
+too much, and it was in vain that Sir Richard pleaded with each of
+the two physicians he sought that her ladyship was ailing--"sad and
+heavy"--and that he must have a potion for her.
+
+Each in turn shook his head. They had no medicine for sorrow, was their
+discreet answer. From his description of her condition, said each, it
+was plain that her ladyship's sickness was of the mind, and, considering
+the tales that were afloat, neither was surprised.
+
+Sir Richard went back to his Oxford lodging with the feeling of a
+man checkmated. For two whole days of that precious time he lay there
+considering what to do. He thought of going to seek a physician in
+Abingdon. But fearing no better success in that quarter, fearing,
+indeed, that in view of the rumours abroad he would merely be
+multiplying what my lord called "footprints," he decided to take
+some other way to his master's ends. He was a resourceful, inventive
+scoundrel, and soon he had devised a plan.
+
+On Friday he wrote from Oxford to Lady Robert, stating that he had a
+communication for her on the subject of his lordship as secret as it was
+urgent. That he desired to come to her at Cumnor again, but dared not do
+so openly. He would come if she would contrive that her servants should
+be absent, and he exhorted her to let no one of them know that he was
+coming, else he might be ruined, out of his desire to serve her.
+
+That letter he dispatched by the hand of his servant Nunweek, desiring
+him to bring an answer. It was a communication that had upon her
+ladyship's troubled mind precisely the effect that the rascal conceived.
+There was about Sir Richard's personality nothing that could suggest
+the villain. He was a smiling, blue-eyed, florid gentleman, of a kindly
+manner that led folk to trust him. And on the occasion of his late
+visit to Cumnor he had displayed such tender solicitude that her
+ladyship--starved of affection as she was--had been deeply touched.
+
+His letter so cunningly couched filled her with vague alarm and with
+anxiety. She had heard so many and such afflicting rumours, and
+had received in my lord's cruel neglect of her such circumstantial
+confirmation of them, that she fastened avidly upon what she deemed the
+chance of learning at last the truth. Sir Richard Verney had my lord's
+confidence, and was much about the court in his attendance upon my lord.
+He would know the truth, and what could this letter mean but that he was
+disposed to tell it.
+
+So she sent him back a line in answer, bidding him come on Sunday
+afternoon. She would contrive to be alone in the house, so that he need
+not fear being seen by any.
+
+As she promised, so she performed, and on the Sunday packed off her
+household to the fair that was being held at Abingdon that day, using
+insistence with the reluctant, and particularly with one of her women,
+a Mrs. Oddingsell, who expressed herself strongly against leaving her
+ladyship alone in that lonely house. At length, however, the last of
+them was got off, and my lady was left impatiently to await her secret
+visitor. It was late afternoon when he arrived, accompanied by Nunweek,
+whom he left to hold the horses under the chestnuts in the avenue.
+Himself he reached the house across the garden, where the blighting hand
+of autumn was already at work.
+
+Within the porch he found her waiting, fretted by her impatience.
+
+"It is very good in you to have come, Sir Richard," was her gracious
+greeting.
+
+"I am your ladyship's devoted servant," was his sufficient answer, and
+he doffed his plumed bonnet, and bowed low before her. "We shall be
+private in your bower above stairs," he added.
+
+"Why, we are private anywhere. I am all alone, as you desired."
+
+"That is very wise--most wise," said he. "Will your ladyship lead the
+way?"
+
+So they went up that steep, spiral staircase, which had loomed so
+prominently in the plans the ingenious scoundrel had evolved. Across
+the gallery on the first floor they entered a little room whose windows
+overlooked the garden. This was her bower--an intimate cosy room,
+reflecting on every hand the gentle, industrious personality of the
+owner. On an oak table near the window were spread some papers and
+account-books concerned with the estate--with which she had sought to
+beguile the time of waiting. She led the way towards this, and, sinking
+into the high-backed chair that stood before it, she looked up at him
+expectantly. She was pale, there were dark stains under her eyes, and
+wistful lines had crept into the sweet face of that neglected wife.
+
+Contemplating his poor victim now, Sir Richard may have compared her
+with the woman by whom my lord desired so impatiently to supplant
+her. She was tall and beautifully shaped, despite an almost maidenly
+slenderness. Her countenance was gentle and adorable, with its soft grey
+eyes and light brown hair, and tender, wistful mouth.
+
+It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently desired
+her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of her. Then he
+obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed the remorseless spur
+of ambition. In reality, then as now, his beacon-light was love of self.
+
+Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious impatience
+to hear the news of her lord which he had promised her, Sir Richard may
+have felt some pang of pity. But, like my lord, he was of those whose
+love of self suffers the rivalry of no weak emotion.
+
+"Your news, Sir Richard," she besought him, her dove-like glance upon
+his florid face--less florid now than was its wont.
+
+He leaned against the table, his back to the window. "Why, it is briefly
+this," said he. "My lord..." And then he checked, and fell into a
+listening attitude.
+
+"What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?"
+
+"No. What is it?" Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting under so
+much mystery.
+
+"Sh! Stay you here," he enjoined. "If we are spied upon..." He left the
+sentence there. Already he was moving quickly, stealthily, towards the
+door. He paused before opening it. "Stay where you are, my lady," he
+enjoined again, so gravely that she could have no thought of disobeying
+him. "I will return at once."
+
+He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There he
+stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of whipcord, attached
+at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle sharpness. That bodkin he drove
+into the edge of one of the panels of the wainscot, in line with the
+topmost step; drawing the cord taut at a height of a foot or so
+above this step, he made fast its other end to the newel-post at
+the stair-head. He had so rehearsed the thing in his mind that the
+performance of it occupied but a few seconds. Such dim light of
+that autumn afternoon as reached the spot would leave that fine cord
+invisible.
+
+Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his absence,
+so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to resolve upon
+disobeying his injunction.
+
+"We move in secret like conspirators," said he, "and so we are easily
+affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my lord himself...
+here?"
+
+"My lord!" she interrupted, coming excitedly to her feet. "Lord Robert?"
+
+"To be sure, my lady. It was he had need to visit you in secret--for did
+the Queen have knowledge of his coming here, it would mean the Tower for
+him. You cannot think what, out of love for you, his lordship suffers.
+The Queen...
+
+"But do you say that he is here, man," her voice shrilled up in
+excitement.
+
+"He is below, my lady. Such is his peril that he dared not set foot in
+Cumnor until he was certain beyond doubt that you are here alone."
+
+"He is below!" she cried, and a flush dyed her pale cheeks, a light
+of gladness quickened her sad eyes. Already she had gathered from his
+cunning words a new and comforting explanation of the things reported to
+her. "He is below!" she repeated. "Oh!" She turned from him, and in an
+instant was speeding towards the door.
+
+He stood rooted there, his nether lip between his teeth, his face a
+ghastly white, whilst she ran on.
+
+"My lord! Robin! Robin!" he heard her calling, as she crossed the
+corridor. Then came a piercing scream that echoed through the silent
+house; a pause; a crashing thud below; and--silence.
+
+Sir Richard remained by the table, immovable. Blood was trickling down
+his chin. He had sunk his teeth through his lip when that scream rang
+out. A long moment thus, as if entranced, awe-stricken. Then he braced
+himself, and went forward, reeling at first like a drunken man. But
+by the time he had reached the stairs he was master of himself again.
+Swiftly, for all his trembling fingers, he unfastened the cord's end
+from the newel-post. The wrench upon it had already pulled the bodkin
+from the wainscot. He went down that abrupt spiral staircase at a
+moderate pace, mechanically coiling the length of whip-cord, and
+bestowing it with the bodkin in his pouch again, and all the while his
+eyes were fixed upon the grey bundle that lay so still at the stairs'
+foot.
+
+He came to it at last, and, pausing, looked more closely. He was
+thankful that there was not the need to touch it. The position of the
+brown-haired head was such as to leave no doubt of the complete success
+of his design. Her neck was broken. Lord Robert Dudley was free to marry
+the Queen.
+
+Deliberately Sir Richard stepped over the huddled body of that poor
+victim of a knave's ambition, crossed the hall, and passed out,
+closing the door. An excellent day's work, thought he, most excellently
+accomplished. The servants, returning from Abingdon Fair on that Sunday
+evening, would find her there. They would publish the fact that in their
+absence her ladyship had fallen downstairs and broken her neck, and that
+was the end of the matter.
+
+But that was not the end at all. Fate, the ironic interloper, had taken
+a hand in this evil game.
+
+The court had moved a few days earlier to Windsor, and thither on
+the Friday--the 6th of September--came Alvarez de Quadra to seek the
+definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the subject of the
+Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at Whitehall, coupled
+with his mistrust of her promises and experience of her fickleness, had
+rendered him uneasy. Either she was trifling with him, or else she was
+behaving in a manner utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke.
+In either case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must know where
+he stood. Having failed to obtain an audience before the court
+left London, he had followed it to Windsor, cursing all women and
+contemplating the advantages of the Salic law.
+
+He found at Windsor an atmosphere of constraint, and it was not until
+the morrow that he obtained an audience with the Queen. Even then this
+was due to chance rather than to design on the part of Elizabeth. For
+they met on the terrace as she was returning from hunting. She dismissed
+those about her, including the stalwart Robert Dudley, and, alone with
+de Quadra, invited him to speak.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am writing to my master, and I desire to know
+whether your Majesty would wish me to add anything to what you have
+announced already as your intention regarding the Archduke."
+
+She knit her brows. The wily Spaniard fenced so closely that there was
+no alternative but to come to grips.
+
+"Why, sir," she answered dryly, "you may tell his Majesty that I
+have come to an absolute decision, which is that I will not marry the
+Archduke."
+
+The colour mounted to the Spaniard's sallow cheeks. Iron self-control
+alone saved him from uttering unpardonable words. Even so he spoke
+sternly:
+
+"This, madame, is not what you had led me to believe when last we talked
+upon the subject."
+
+At another time Elizabeth might have turned upon him and rent him for
+that speech. But it happened that she was in high good-humour that
+afternoon, and disposed to indulgence. She laughed, surveying herself in
+the small steel mirror that dangled from her waist.
+
+"You are ungallant to remind me, my lord," said she. "My sex, you may
+have heard, is privileged to change of mind."
+
+"Then, madame, I pray that you may change it yet again." His tone was
+bitter.
+
+"Your prayer will not be heard. This time I am resolved."
+
+De Quadra bowed. "The King, my master, will not be pleased, I fear."
+
+She looked him straightly in the face, her dark eyes kindling.
+
+"God's death!" said she, "I marry to please myself, and not the King
+your master."
+
+"You are resolved on marriage then?" flashed he.
+
+"And it please you," she mocked him archly, her mood of joyousness
+already conquering her momentary indignation.
+
+"What pleases you must please me also, madame," he answered, in a tone
+so cold that it belied his words. "That it please you, is reason enough
+why you should marry... Whom did your Majesty say?"
+
+"Nay. I named no names. Yet one so astute might hazard a shrewd guess."
+Half-challenging, half-coy, she eyed him over her fan.
+
+"A guess? Nay, madame. I might affront your Majesty."
+
+"How so?"
+
+"If I were deluded by appearances. If I named a subject who signally
+enjoys your royal favour."
+
+"You mean Lord Robert Dudley." She paled a little, and her bosom's heave
+was quickened. "Why should the guess affront me?"
+
+"Because a queen--a wise queen, madame--does not mate with a
+subject--particularly with one who has a wife already."
+
+He had stung her. He had wounded at once the pride of the woman and the
+dignity of the queen, yet in a way that made it difficult for her to
+take direct offense. She bit her lip and mastered her surge of anger.
+Then she laughed, a thought sneeringly.
+
+"Why, as to my Lord Robert's wife, it seems you are less well-informed
+than usual, sir. Lady Robert Dudley is dead, or very nearly so."
+
+And as blank amazement overspread his face, she passed upon her way and
+left him.
+
+But anon, considering, she grew vaguely uneasy, and that very night
+expressed her afflicting doubt to my lord, reporting to him de Quadra's
+words. His lordship, who was mentally near-sighted, laughed.
+
+"He'll change his tone before long," said he.
+
+She set her hands upon his shoulders, and looked up adoringly into his
+handsome gipsy face. Never had he known her so fond as in these
+last days since her surrender to him that night upon the terrace at
+Whitehall, never had she been more the woman and less the queen in her
+bearing towards him.
+
+"You are sure, Robin? You are quite sure?" she pleaded.
+
+He drew her close, she yielding herself to his embrace. "With so much
+at stake could I be less than sure, sweet?" said he, and so convinced
+her--the more easily since he afforded her the conviction she desired.
+
+That was on the night of Saturday, and early on Monday came the news
+which justified him of his assurances. It was brought him to Windsor
+by one of Amy's Cumnor servants, a fellow named Bowes, who, with the
+others, had been away at Abingdon Fair yesterday afternoon, and had
+returned to find his mistress dead at the stairs' foot--the result of an
+accident, as all believed.
+
+It was not quite the news that my lord had been expecting. It staggered
+him a little that an accident so very opportune should have come to
+resolve his difficulties, obviating the need for recourse to those more
+dangerous measures with which he had charged Sir Richard Verney. He
+perceived how suspicion might now fall upon himself, how his enemies
+would direct it, and on the instant made provision. There and then he
+seized a pen, and wrote to his kinsman, Sir Thomas Blount, who even then
+was on his way to Cumnor. He stated in the letter what he had learnt
+from Bowes, bade Blount engage the coroner to make the strictest
+investigation, and send for Amy's natural brother, Appleyard. "Have no
+respect to any living person," was the final injunction of that letter
+which he sent Blount by the hand of Bowes.
+
+And, then, before he could carry to the Queen the news of this accident
+which had broken his matrimonial shackles, Sir Richard Verney arrived
+with the true account. He had expected praise and thanks from his
+master. Instead, he met first dismay, and then anger and fierce
+reproaches.
+
+"My lord, this is unjust," the faithful retainer protested. "Knowing the
+urgency, I took the only way--contrived the accident."
+
+"Pray God," said Dudley, "that the jury find it to have been an
+accident; for if the truth should come to be discovered, I leave you to
+the consequences. I warned you of that before you engaged in this. Look
+for no help from me."
+
+"I look for none," said Sir Richard, stung to hot contempt by the
+meanness and cowardice so characteristic of the miserable egotist he
+served. "Nor will there be the need, for I have left no footprints.
+
+"I hope that may be so, for I tell you, man, that I have ordered a
+strict inquiry, bidding them have no respect to any living person, and
+to that I shall adhere."
+
+"And if, in spite of that, I am not hanged?" quoth Sir Richard, a sneer
+upon his white face.
+
+"Come to me again when the affair is closed, and we will talk of it."
+
+Sir Richard went out, rage and disgust in his heart, leaving my lord
+with rage and fear in his.
+
+Grown calmer now, my lord dressed himself with care and sought the
+Queen to tell her of the accident that had removed the obstacle to their
+marriage. And that same night her Majesty coldly informed de Quadra that
+Lady Robert Dudley had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her
+neck.
+
+The Spaniard received the information with a countenance that was
+inscrutable.
+
+"Your Majesty's gift of prophecy is not so widely known as it deserves
+to be," was his cryptic comment.
+
+She stared at him blankly a moment. Then a sudden uneasy memory awakened
+by his words, she drew him forward to a window embrasure apart from
+those who had stood about her, and for greater security addressed him,
+as he tells us, in Italian.
+
+"I do not think I understand you, sir. Will you be plain with me?" She
+stood erect and stiff, and frowned upon him after the manner of her
+bullying father. But de Quadra held the trumps, and was not easily
+intimidated.
+
+"About the prophecy?" said he. "Why, did not your Majesty foretell the
+poor lady's death a full day before it came to pass? Did you not say
+that she was already dead, or nearly so?"
+
+He saw her blench; saw fear stare from those dark eyes that could be so
+very bold. Then her ever-ready anger followed swiftly.
+
+"'Sblood, man! What do you imply?" she cried, and went on without
+waiting for his answer. "The poor woman was sick and ill, and must
+soon have succumbed; it will no doubt be found that the accident which
+anticipated nature was due to her condition."
+
+Gently he shook his head, relishing her discomfiture, taking
+satisfaction in torturing her who had flouted him and his master, in
+punishing her whom he had every reason to believe guilty.
+
+"Your Majesty, I fear, has been ill-informed on that score. The poor
+lady was in excellent health--and like to have lived for many years--at
+least, so I gather from Sir William Cecil, whose information is usually
+exact."
+
+She clutched his arm. "You told him what I had said?"
+
+"It was indiscreet, perhaps. Yet, how was I to know...?" He left his
+sentence there. "I but expressed my chagrin at your decision on the
+score of the Archduke--hardly a wise decision, if I may be so bold," he
+added slyly.
+
+She caught the suggestion of a bargain, and became instantly suspicious.
+
+"You transcend the duties of your office, my lord," she rebuked him, and
+turned away.
+
+But soon that night she was closeted with Dudley, and closely
+questioning him about the affair. My lord was mightily vehement.
+
+"I take Heaven to be my witness," quoth he, when she all but taxed him
+with having procured his lady's death, "that I am innocent of any part
+in it. My injunctions to Blount, who has gone to Cumnor, are that the
+matter be sifted without respect to any person, and if it can be shown
+that this is other than the accident I deem it, the murderer shall
+hang."
+
+She flung her arms about his neck, and laid her head on his shoulder.
+"Oh, Robin, Robin, I am full of fears," she wailed, and was nearer to
+tears than he had ever seen her.
+
+But, anon, as the days passed their fears diminished, and finally the
+jury at Cumnor--delayed in their finding, and spurred by my lord to
+exhaustive inquiries--returned a verdict of "found dead," which in all
+the circumstances left his lordship--who was known, moreover, to have
+been at Windsor when his lady died--fully acquitted. Both he and the
+Queen took courage from that finding, and made no secret of it now that
+they would very soon be wed.
+
+But there were many whom that finding did not convince, who read my
+lord too well, and would never suffer him to reap the fruits of his evil
+deed. Prominent among these were Arundel--who himself had aimed at the
+Queen's hand--Norfolk and Pembroke, and behind them was a great mass of
+the people. Indignation against Lord Robert was blazing out, fanned
+by such screaming preachers as Lever, who, from the London pulpits,
+denounced the projected marriage, hinting darkly at the truth of Amy
+Dudley's death.
+
+What was hinted at home was openly expressed abroad, and in Paris Mary
+Stuart ventured a cruel witticism that Elizabeth was to conserve in
+her memory: "The Queen of England," she said, "is about to marry her
+horse-keeper, who has killed his wife to make a place for her."
+
+Yet Elizabeth persisted in her intent to marry Dudley, until the sober
+Cecil conveyed to her towards the end of that month of September some
+notion of the rebellion that was smouldering.
+
+She flared out at him, of course. But he stood his ground.
+
+"There is," he reminded her, "this unfortunate matter of a prophecy, as
+the Bishop of Aquila persists in calling it."
+
+"God's Body! Is the rogue blabbing?"
+
+"What else did your Majesty expect from a man smarting under a sense of
+injury? He has published it broadcast that on the day before Lady Robert
+broke her neck, you told him that she was dead or nearly so. And he
+argues from it a guilty foreknowledge on your Majesty's part of what was
+planned."
+
+"A guilty foreknowledge!" She almost choked in rage, and then fell to
+swearing as furiously in that moment as old King Harry at his worst.
+
+"Madame!" he cried, shaken by her vehemence. "I but report the phrase he
+uses. It is not mine."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"I do not, madame. If I did I should not be here at present."
+
+"Does any subject of mine believe it?"
+
+"They suspend their judgment. They wait to learn the truth from the
+sequel."
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"That if your motive prove to be such as de Quadra and others allege,
+they will be in danger of believing."
+
+"Be plain, man, in God's name. What exactly is alleged?"
+
+He obeyed her very fully.
+
+"That my lord contrived the killing of his wife so that he might have
+liberty to marry your Majesty, and that your Majesty was privy to the
+deed." He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before she could let loose
+her wrath. "It is still in your power, madame, to save your honour,
+which is now in peril. But there is only one way in which you can
+accomplish it. If you put from you all thought of marrying Lord Robert,
+England will believe that de Quadra and those others lied. If you
+persist and carry out your intention, you proclaim the truth of his
+report; and you see what must inevitably follow."
+
+She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
+
+Within a few hours of that interview she delivered her answer to Cecil,
+which was that she had no intention of marrying Dudley.
+
+Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing her heart, by
+renouncing marriage with the only man she could have taken for her mate
+of all who had wooed her. Yet the wound of that renunciation was slow to
+heal. She trifled with the notion of other marriages, but ever and anon,
+in her despair, perhaps, we see her turning longing eyes towards the
+handsome Lord Robert, later made Earl of Leicester. Once, indeed, some
+six years after Amy's death, there was again some talk of her marrying
+him, which was quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how Amy
+died. Between these two, between the fulfilment of her desire and his
+ambition, stood the irreconcilable ghost of his poor murdered wife.
+
+Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression in her
+passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's child:
+"The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but a barren
+stock."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+
+The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+
+Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred voyage to
+El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural, seeing that Sir
+Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but also Sir Walter's very
+good friend and kinsman.
+
+If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality as kinsman or as
+Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him, the cordiality of the latter's
+embrace and the noble entertainment following at the house of Sir
+Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis conducted him, set
+this doubt at rest and relighted the lamp of hope in the despairing soul
+of our adventurer. In Sir Lewis he saw only his kinsman--his very
+good friend and kinsman, to insist upon Stukeley's own description of
+himself--at a time when of all others in his crowded life he needed the
+support of a kinsman and the guidance of a friend.
+
+You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the brightest
+ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might have added lustre
+to that of King James, had not his Sowship--to employ the title bestowed
+upon that prince by his own queen--been too mean of soul to appreciate
+the man's great worth. Courtier, philosopher, soldier, man of letters
+and man of action alike, Ralegh was at once the greatest prose-writer,
+and one of the greatest captains of his age, the last survivor of that
+glorious company--whose other members were Drake and Frobisher and
+Hawkins--that had given England supremacy upon the seas, that had broken
+the power and lowered the pride of Spain.
+
+His was a name that had resounded, to the honour and glory of England,
+throughout the world, a name that, like Drake's, was a thing of hate and
+terror to King Philip and his Spaniards; yet the King of Scots, unclean
+of body and of mind, who had succeeded to the throne of Elizabeth, must
+affect ignorance of that great name which shall never die while England
+lives.
+
+When the splendid courtier stood before him--for at fifty Sir Walter was
+still handsome of person and magnificent of Apparel--James looked him
+over and inquired who he might be. When they had told him:
+
+"I've rawly heard of thee," quoth the royal punster, who sought by such
+atrocities of speech to be acclaimed a wit.
+
+It was ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see this
+great and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge of high
+treason, bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal, peddling lawyers,
+and, finally, although his wit and sincerity had shattered every
+fragment of evidence brought against him, sentenced to death. Thus far
+James went; but he hesitated to go further, hesitated to carry out the
+sentence. Sir Walter had too many friends in England then; the memory of
+his glorious deeds was still too fresh in the public mind, and execution
+might have been attended by serious consequences for King James.
+Besides, one at least of the main objects was achieved. Sir Walter's
+broad acres were confiscate by virtue of that sentence, and King James
+wanted the land--filched thus from one who was England's pride--to
+bestow it upon one of those golden calves of his who were England's
+shame.
+
+"I maun hae the land for Carr. I maun hae it," was his brazen and
+peevish answer to an appeal against the confiscation.
+
+For thirteen years Sir Walter lay in the Tower, under that sentence of
+death passed in 1603, enjoying after a season a certain liberty, visited
+there by his dear lady and his friends, among whom was Henry, Prince of
+Wales, who did not hesitate to publish that no man but his father--whom
+he detested--would keep such a bird in a cage. He beguiled the time in
+literary and scientific pursuits, distilling his essences and writing
+that stupendous work of his, "The History of the World." Thus old age
+crept upon him; but far from quenching the fires of enterprise within
+his adventurer's soul, it brought a restlessness that urged him at last
+to make a bid for liberty. Despairing of winning it from the clemency of
+James, he applied his wits to extracting it from the King's cupidity.
+
+Throughout his life, since the day when first he had brought himself to
+the notice of a Queen by making of his cloak a carpet for her feet, he
+had retained side by side with the dignity of the sage and the
+greatness of the hero, the craft and opportunism of the adventurer. His
+opportunity now was the straitened condition of the royal treasury, a
+hint of which had been let fall by Winwood the Secretary of State. He
+announced at once that he knew of a gold mine in Guiana, the El Dorado
+of the Spaniards.
+
+On his return from a voyage to Guiana in 1595, he had written of it
+thus:
+
+"There the common soldier shall fight for gold instead of pence, pay
+himself with plates half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his bones in
+other wars for provant and penury Those commanders and chieftains that
+shoot at honour and abundance shall find here more rich and beautiful
+cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled
+with treasure than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru."
+
+Winwood now reminded him that as a consequence many expeditions had gone
+out, but failed to discover any of these things.
+
+"That," said Ralegh, "is because those adventurers were ignorant alike
+of the country and of the art of conciliating its inhabitants. Were I
+permitted to go, I would make Guiana to England what Peru has been to
+Spain."
+
+That statement, reported to James in his need, was enough to fire his
+cupidity, and when Ralegh had further added that he would guarantee
+to the Crown one-fifth of the treasure without asking any contribution
+towards the adventure either in money or in ships, he was permitted to
+come forth and prepare for the expedition.
+
+His friends came to his assistance, and in March of 1617 he set sail for
+El Dorado with a well-manned and well-equipped fleet of fourteen ships,
+the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke standing sureties for his return.
+
+From the outset the fates were unpropitious. Disaster closed the
+adventure. Gondomar, the Ambassador of Spain at Whitehall, too
+well-informed of what was afoot, had warned his master. Spanish ships
+waited to frustrate Sir Walter, who was under pledge to avoid all
+conflict with the forces of King Philip. But conflict there was, and
+bloodshed in plenty, about the city of Manoa, which the Spaniards held
+as the key to the country into which the English adventurers sought
+to penetrate. Among the slain were the Governor of Manoa, who was
+Gondomar's own brother, and Sir Walter's eldest son.
+
+To Ralegh, waiting at the mouth of the Orinoco, came his beaten forces
+in retreat, with the terrible news of a happening that meant his
+ruin. Half-maddened, his anguish increased by the loss of his boy, he
+upbraided them so fiercely that Keymis, who had been in charge of
+the expedition, shut himself up in his cabin and shot himself with
+a pocket-pistol. Mutiny followed, and Whitney--most trusted of Sir
+Walter's captains--set sail for England, being followed by six other
+ships of that fleet, which meanwhile had been reduced to twelve. With
+the remaining five the stricken Sir Walter had followed more at leisure.
+What need to hurry? Disgrace, and perhaps death, awaited him in England.
+He knew the power of Spain with James, who was so set upon a Spanish
+marriage for his heir, knew Spain's hatred of himself, and what
+eloquence it would gather in the mouth of Gondomar, intent upon avenging
+his brother's death.
+
+He feared the worst, and so was glad upon landing to have by him a
+kinsman upon whom he could lean for counsel and guidance in this the
+darkest hour of all his life. Sitting late that night in the library of
+Sir Christopher Hare's house, Sir Walter told his cousin in detail the
+story of his misadventure, and confessed to his misgivings.
+
+"My brains are broken," was his cry.
+
+Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to offer.
+
+"It was not expected," said he, "that you would return.
+
+"Not expected?" Sir Walter's bowed white head was suddenly flung back.
+Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed. "What act in
+all my life justified the belief I should be false to honour? My danger
+here was made quite plain, and Captain King would have had me steer a
+course for France, where I had found a welcome and a harbour. But to
+consent I must have been false to my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke,
+who were sureties to the King for my return. Life is still sweet to me,
+despite my three-score years and more, but honour is sweeter still."
+
+And then, because life was sweet, he bluntly asked his cousin: "What is
+the King's intent by me?"
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley, "who shall know what passes in the King's
+mind? From the signs, I judge your case to be none so desperate. You
+have good friends in plenty, among whom, although the poorest, count
+myself the first. Anon, when you are rested, we'll to London by easy
+stages, baiting at the houses of your friends, and enlisting their good
+offices on your behalf."
+
+Ralegh took counsel on the matter with Captain King, a bluff,
+tawny-bearded seaman, who was devoted to him body and soul.
+
+"Sir Lewis proposes it, eh?" quoth the hardy seaman. "And Sir Lewis
+is Vice-Admiral of Devon? He is not by chance bidden to escort you to
+London?"
+
+The Captain, clearly, had escaped the spell of Stukeley's affability.
+Sir Walter was indignant. He had never held his kinsman in great
+esteem, and had never been on the best of terms with him in the past.
+Nevertheless, he was very far from suspecting him of what King implied.
+To convince him that he did Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt
+question to his kinsman in King's presence.
+
+"Nay," said Sir Lewis, "I am not yet bidden to escort you. But as
+Vice-Admiral of Devon I may at any moment be so bidden. It were wiser, I
+hold, not to await such an order. Though even if it come," he made
+haste to add, "you may still count upon my friendship. I am your kinsman
+first, and Vice-Admiral after."
+
+With a smile that irradiated his handsome, virile countenance, Sir
+Walter held out his hand to clasp his cousin's in token of appreciation.
+Captain King expressed no opinion save what might be conveyed in a grunt
+and a shrug.
+
+Guided now unreservedly by his cousin's counsel, Sir Walter set out with
+him upon that journey to London. Captain King went with them, as well
+as Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a Frenchman named Manourie,
+who had made his first appearance in the Plymouth household on the
+previous day. Stukeley explained the fellow as a gifted man of medicine,
+whom he had sent for to cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment
+by which he was afflicted.
+
+Journeying by slow stages, as Sir Lewis had directed, they came at
+last to Brentford. Sir Walter, had he followed his own bent, would have
+journeyed more slowly still, for in a measure, as he neared London,
+apprehensions of what might await him there grew ever darker. He spoke
+of them to King, and the blunt Captain said nothing to dispel them.
+
+"You are being led like a sheep to the shambles," he declared, "and
+you go like a sheep. You should have landed in France, where you have
+friends. Even now it is not too late. A ship could be procured..."
+
+"And my honour could be sunk at sea," Sir Walter harshly concluded, in
+reproof of such counsel.
+
+But at the inn at Brentford he was sought out by a visitor, who brought
+him the like advice in rather different terms. This was De Chesne, the
+secretary of the French envoy, Le Clerc. Cordially welcomed by Ralegh,
+the Frenchman expressed his deep concern to see Sir Walter under arrest.
+
+"You conclude too hastily," laughed Sir Walter.
+
+"Monsieur, I do not conclude. I speak of what I am inform'."
+
+"Misinformed, sir. I am not a prisoner--at least, not yet," he added,
+with a sigh. "I travel of my own free will to London with my good friend
+and kinsman Stukeley to lay the account of my voyage before the King."
+
+"Of your own free will? You travel of your own free will? And you are
+not a prisoner? Ha!" There was bitter mockery in De Chesne's short
+laugh. "C'est bien drole!" And he explained: "Milord the Duke o
+Buckingham, he has write in his master's name to the ambassador Gondomar
+that you are taken and held at the disposal of the King of Spain.
+Gondomar is to inform him whether King Philip wish that you be sent to
+Spain to essay the justice of his Catholic Majesty, or that you suffer
+here. Meanwhile your quarters are being made ready in the Tower. Yet you
+tell me you are not prisoner! You go of your own free will to London.
+Sir Walter, do not be deceive'. If you reach London, you are lost."
+
+Now here was news to shatter Sir Walter's last illusion. Yet desperately
+he clung to the fragments of it. The envoy's secretary must be at fault.
+
+"'Tis yourself are at fault, Sir Walter, in that you trust those about
+you," the Frenchman insisted.
+
+Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. "D'ye mean Stukeley?" quoth he,
+half-indignant already at the mere suggestion.
+
+"Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman." De Chesne shrugged. "You should know
+your family better than I. But who is this Manourie who accompanies you?
+Where is he come from? What you know of him?"
+
+Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing.
+
+"But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation. A spy who does not
+scruple to sell his own people. And I know that letters of commission
+from the Privy Council for your arrest were give' to him in London ten
+days ago. Whether those letters were to himself, or he was just the
+messenger to another, imports nothing. The fact is everything. The
+warrant against you exists, and it is in the hands of one or another of
+those that accompany you. I say no more. As I have tol' you, you should
+know your own family. But of this be sure, they mean that you go to
+the Tower, and so to your death. And now, Sir Walter, if I show you the
+disease I also bring the remedy. I am command' by my master to offer
+you a French barque which is in the Thames, and a safe conduct to the
+Governor of Calais. In France you will find safety and honour, as your
+worth deserve'."
+
+Up sprang Sir Walter from his chair, and flung off the cloak of thought
+in which he had been mantled.
+
+"Impossible," he said. "Impossible! There is my plighted word to return,
+and there are my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who are sureties for me.
+I cannot leave them to suffer by my default."
+
+"They will not suffer at all," De Chesne assured him. He was very well
+informed. "King James has yielded to Spain partly because he fears,
+partly because he will have a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, and
+will do nothing to trouble his good relations with King Philip. But,
+after all, you have friends, whom his Majesty also fears. If you escape'
+you would resolve all his perplexities. I do not believe that any
+obstacle will be offer' to your escape--else why they permit you to
+travel thus without any guard, and to retain your sword?"
+
+Half distracted as he was by what he had learnt, yet Sir Walter clung
+stoutly and obstinately to what he believed to be the only course for a
+man of honour. And so he dismissed De Chesne with messages of gratitude
+but refusal to his master, and sent for Captain King. Together they
+considered all that the secretary had stated, and King agreed with De
+Chesne's implied opinion that it was Sir Lewis himself who held the
+warrant.
+
+They sent for him at once, and Ralegh straightly taxed him with it. Sir
+Lewis as straightly admitted it, and when King thereupon charged him
+with deceit he showed no anger, but only the profoundest grief. He sank
+into a chair, and took his head in his hands.
+
+"What could I do? What could I do?" he cried. "The warrant came in the
+very moment we were setting out. At first I thought of telling you; and
+then I bethought me that to do so would be but to trouble your mind,
+without being able to offer you help."
+
+Sir Walter understood what was implied. "Did you not say," he asked,
+"that you were my kinsman first and Vice-Admiral of Devon after?"
+
+"Ay--and so I am. Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral, which
+has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape, I'd never
+hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as closely as he
+watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And that is why I have held
+my peace on the score of this warrant. What can it help that I should
+trouble you with the matter until at the same time I can offer you some
+way out?"
+
+"The Frenchman has a throat, and throats can be slit," said the
+downright King.
+
+"So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them," returned Sir
+Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first argument, using
+now such forceful logic and obvious sincerity that Sir Walter was
+convinced. He was no less convinced, too, of the peril in which he
+stood. He plied those wits of his, which had rarely failed him in an
+extremity. Manourie was the difficulty. But in his time he had known
+many of these agents who, without sentimental interest and purely for
+the sake of gold, were ready to play such parts; and never yet had
+he known one who was not to be corrupted. So that evening he desired
+Manourie's company in the room above stairs that had been set apart for
+Sir Walter's use. Facing him across the table at which both were seated,
+Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon the board, and, suddenly
+opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady eyes with the jewel sparkling
+in his palm.
+
+"Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?"
+
+Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-featured
+fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's grimly smiling
+eyes, then again at the white diamond, from which the candlelight was
+striking every colour of the rainbow. He made a shrewd estimate of its
+price, and shook his black head. He had quite recovered from the shock
+of Sir Walter's question.
+
+"Not half as much," he confessed, with impudence.
+
+"Then you might find it more remunerative to serve me," said the knight.
+"This jewel is to be earned."
+
+The agent's eyes flickered; he passed his tongue over his lips. "As
+how?" quoth he.
+
+"Briefly thus: I have but learnt of the trammel in which I am taken. I
+must have time to concert my measures of escape, and time is almost at
+an end. You are skilled in drugs, so my kinsman tells me. Can you so
+drug me as to deceive physicians that I am in extremis?"
+
+Manourie considered awhile.
+
+"I... I think I could," he answered presently.
+
+"And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say.. two such
+stones?"
+
+The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it was
+prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir Walter's.
+
+"About it, then." Sir Walter rolled the gem across the board into the
+clutch of the spy, which pounced to meet it. "Keep that in earnest. The
+other will follow when we have cozened them."
+
+Next morning Sir Walter could not resume the journey. When Cotterell
+went to dress him he found his master taken with vomits, and reeling
+like a drunkard. The valet ran to fetch Sir Lewis, and when they
+returned together they found Sir Walter on all fours gnawing the rushes
+on the floor, his face livid and horribly distorted, his brow glistening
+with sweat.
+
+Stukeley, in alarm, ordered Cotterell to get his master back to bed
+and to foment him, which was done. But on the next day there was no
+improvement, and on the third things were in far more serious case.
+The skin of his brow and arms and breast was inflamed, and covered with
+horrible purple blotches--the result of an otherwise harmless ointment
+with which the French empiric had supplied him.
+
+When Stukeley beheld him thus disfigured, and lying apparently inert
+and but half-conscious upon his bed, he backed away in terror. The
+Vice-Admiral had seen afore-time the horrible manifestations of the
+plague, and could not be mistaken here. He fled from the infected air
+of his kinsman's chamber, and summoned what physicians were available
+to pronounce and prescribe. The physicians came--three in number--but
+manifested no eagerness to approach the patient closely. The mere sight
+of him was enough to lead them to the decision that he was afflicted
+with the plague in a singularly virulent form.
+
+Presently one of them plucked up courage so far as to feel the pulse
+of the apparently delirious patient. Its feebleness confirmed his
+diagnosis; moreover the hand he held was cold and turgid. He was not to
+know that Sir Walter had tightly wrapped about his upper arm the ribbon
+from his poniard, and so he was entirely deceived.
+
+The physicians withdrew, and delivered their verdict, whereupon Sir
+Lewis at once sent word of it to the Privy Council.
+
+That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the news,
+came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter's chamber by
+Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman's amazement he
+found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a hand-mirror a face
+that was horrible beyond description with the complacent smile of one
+who takes satisfaction in his appearance. Yet there was no fevered
+madness in the smiling eyes. They were alive with intelligence,
+amounting, indeed, to craft.
+
+"Ah, King!" was the glad welcome "The prophet David did make himself a
+fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard, to escape from the
+hands of his enemies And there was Brutus, ay, and others as memorable
+who have descended to such artifice."
+
+Though he laughed, it is clear that he was seeking to excuse an
+unworthiness of which he was conscious.
+
+"Artifice?" quoth King, aghast. "Is this artifice?"
+
+"Ay--a hedge against my enemies, who will be afraid to approach me."
+
+King sat himself down by his master's bed. "A better hedge against your
+enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of sea 'twixt here and
+France. Would to Heaven you had done as I advised ere you set foot in
+this ungrateful land."
+
+"The omission may be repaired," said Sir Walter.
+
+Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir Walter
+had been reconsidering De Chesne's assurance touching my Lords of
+Arundel and Pembroke, and he had come to conclude--the more readily,
+perhaps because it was as he would have it--that De Chesne was right;
+that to break faith with them were no such great matter after all, nor
+one for which they would be called upon to suffer. And so, now, when it
+was all but too late, he yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and
+consented to save himself by flight to France. King was to go about the
+business of procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need
+of desperate haste, as was shown when presently orders came to Brentford
+for the disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at Salisbury,
+desired that Sir Walter should be conveyed to his own house in London.
+Stukeley reported this to him, proclaiming it a sign of royal favour.
+Sir Walter was not deceived. He knew the reason to be fear lest he
+should infect the Tower with the plague by which he was reported
+stricken.
+
+So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London, and
+safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his loving
+friend and kinsman. Manourie's part being fulfilled and the aim
+accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment by bestowing
+upon him the second diamond--a form of eminently portable currency with
+which the knight was well supplied. On the morrow Manourie was gone,
+dismissed as a consequence of the part he had played.
+
+It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this--a very well informed and
+injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to forfeit the
+knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter secretly concerted
+means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to trust him?
+
+Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he considered
+King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him of his kinsman's
+general neediness, remembered past events that shed light upon his ways
+and nature, and began now at last to have a sense of the man's hypocrisy
+and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned in regard to him precisely as he
+had reasoned in regard to Manourie. The fellow was acquisitive, and
+therefore corruptible. If, indeed, he was so base that he had been
+bought to betray Sir Walter, then he could be bought again to betray
+those who had so bought him.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Sir Walter easily. "It is not lack of trust in you, my
+good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and knowing as I do
+the upright honesty of your character I feared to embarrass you with
+things whose very knowledge must give you the parlous choice of being
+false to that office or false to me."
+
+Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most
+accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have
+fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin
+remember. It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had
+gained to attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France.
+And this notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he
+would lose his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had
+paid for it.
+
+"As to that, you shall be at no loss," Sir Walter assured him. "I could
+not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you shall have a
+thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am safely landed in
+France or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what is to come, here is a
+toy of value for you." And he presented Sir Lewis with a jewel of price,
+a great ruby encrusted in diamonds.
+
+Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir Lewis
+was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir Walter's plans,
+and to render him all possible assistance. True, this assistance was a
+costly matter; there was this person to be bought and that one; there
+were expenses here and expenses there, incurred by Sir Lewis on his
+kinsman's behalf; and there were odd presents, too, which Stukeley
+seemed to expect and which Sir Walter could not deny him. He had no
+illusions now that King had been right; that here he was dealing with
+a rogue who would exact the uttermost farthing for his services, but
+he was gratified at the shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's
+measure, and did not grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the
+scaffold.
+
+De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his master's offer
+of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such other assistance as Sir
+Walter might require But by now the knight's arrangements were complete.
+His servant Cotterell had come to inform him that his own boatswain,
+now in London, was the owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury,
+admirably suited for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's
+disposal. It had been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King,
+that they should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell
+was bidden desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea at
+once. In view of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily compromising
+the French envoy, Sir Walter gratefully declined the latter's offer.
+
+And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the flight.
+Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of Manourie's
+ointment, had practically recovered his normal appearance, covering his
+long white hair under a Spanish hat, and muffling the half of his face
+in the folds of a cloak, came to Wapping Stairs--that ill-omened place
+of execution of pirates and sea-rovers--accompanied by Cotterell, who
+carried the knight's cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son.
+Out of solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could
+not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage. At the
+head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the foot of them a
+boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at the tiller.
+
+King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
+
+"You feared perhaps we should not come," said Stukeley, with a sneer at
+the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. "Yet now, I trust, you'll do me
+the justice to admit that I have shown myself an honest man."
+
+The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the words.
+
+"I hope that you'll continue so," he answered stiffly.
+
+They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore glided
+slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the ebbing tide.
+
+A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-out,
+observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher up the
+river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if proceeding towards
+London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and follow them. Instantly he
+drew the attention of Sir Walter to that pursuing wherry.
+
+"What's this?" quoth Sir Walter harshly. "Are we betrayed?"
+
+The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their oars.
+
+"Put back," Sir Walter bade them. "I'll not betray my friends to no
+purpose. Put back, and let us home again."
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry. "We are
+more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose be such as you
+suspect--for which suspicion, when all is said, there is no ground. On
+then!" He addressed himself to the watermen, whipping out a pistol, and
+growing truculent in mien and voice. "To your oars! Row, you dogs, or
+I'll pistol you where you sit."
+
+The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But Sir
+Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the wisdom of
+keeping to their down-stream course if they were being followed.
+
+"But are we followed?" cried the impatient Sir Lewis. "'Sdeath, cousin,
+is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and must every
+wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us? If you are to
+halt at every shadow, faith, you'll never accomplish anything. I vow I
+am unfortunate in having a friend whom I would save so full of doubts
+and fears."
+
+Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that he had
+suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under Stukeley's suasion,
+now threw themselves heartily into their task, and onward sped the boat
+through the deepening night, taking but little account of that other
+wherry that hung ever in their wake. In this wise they came at length to
+Greenwich on the last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning
+to grow against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's
+enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring that
+they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
+
+Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade them
+put him ashore at Purfleet.
+
+"And that's the soundest counsel," quoth the boatswain. "For at Purfleet
+we can get horses on to Tilbury."
+
+Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical Captain
+King.
+
+"'Tis useless," he declared to them. "At this hour how shall you get
+horses to go by land?"
+
+And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other wherry
+bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A
+hail came to them across the water.
+
+"Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!" cried Ralegh bitterly, and Stukeley
+swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him. "Put ashore," he
+said shortly, "and let us home."
+
+"Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the enterprise,
+and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be said to me for this
+active assistance in your escape?" His voice was gloomy, his face drawn
+and white.
+
+"Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to seize
+on my private papers?" suggested the ingenious mind of Ralegh.
+
+"I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?" His loom was deepening to
+despair.
+
+Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account. His
+generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his friends than
+with his own doom. He desired to make amends to Stukeley, but had no
+means save such as lay in the power of that currency he used. Having
+naught else to give, he must give that. He plunged his hand into an
+inner pocket, and brought forth a handful of jewels, which he thrust
+upon his kinsman.
+
+"Courage," he urged him. "Up now, and we may yet win out and home, so
+that all will be well with you at least, and you shall not suffer for
+your friendship to me."
+
+Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to serve him.
+
+They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and almost at
+the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately above them. Men
+sprang from her, with the obvious intent of cutting off their retreat.
+
+"Too late!" said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion now that
+the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost. "You must act on
+my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis."
+
+"Indeed, there is no other course," Sir Lewis agreed. "And you are in
+the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined with me
+but to betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each supporting the
+other..."
+
+"I'll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor," roared the Captain
+furiously. "And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld understand my
+meaning."
+
+"So, so?" said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was observed
+that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken their stand beside
+him as if in readiness for action. "Why, then, since you will have it
+so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King's name, on a charge of abetting
+treason."
+
+The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer amazement. Then
+he groped for a pistol to do at last what he realized he should have
+done long since. Instantly he was overpowered. It was only then that Sir
+Walter understood the thing that had happened, and with understanding
+came fury. The old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his
+rapier to put it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But
+he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held by the
+men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert, whom he knew
+for Stukeley's cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert formally asking him for
+the surrender of his sword.
+
+Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked coldly at
+his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the growing light of
+the early summer dawn "Sir Lewis," was all he said, "these actions will
+not turn out to your credit."
+
+He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full one. His
+dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending first
+to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty husk to
+the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with the hare
+and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had
+done no less. Amongst them they had "cozened the great cozener"--to use
+Stukeley's own cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial
+that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it
+was only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant
+of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might the more
+effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter discovered also
+that the ship in which he had landed, and other matters, were to provide
+additional Judas' fees to this acquisitive betrayer.
+
+If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices
+unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost he
+conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond equal. So
+calm and self-possessed and masterly was his defence from the charge of
+piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and so shrewd in its inflaming
+appeal to public opinion, that his judges were constrained to abandon
+that line of prosecution, and could discover no way of giving his head
+to King James save by falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence
+of death against him. Of this they now ordered execution.
+
+Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it met
+death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with that
+elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He wore a ruff
+band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a doublet of hair-coloured
+satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black cut taffety breeches and
+ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his plumed hat he covered his white
+locks with a wrought nightcap. This last he bestowed on his way to the
+scaffold upon a bald-headed old man who had come to take a last look of
+him, with the observation that he was more in need of it than himself.
+When he had removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as
+usual. This was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the prison
+of the Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir Walter had put him
+off with a laugh and a jest.
+
+"Let them comb it that shall have it," he had said of his own head.
+
+Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him with
+the observation that he had a long journey before him, he called for
+the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers along the edge, and
+smiled.
+
+"Sharp medicine," quoth he, "but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the East:
+
+"It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his heart
+lies right," he said.
+
+Thus passed one of England's greatest heroes, indeed one of the very
+makers of this England, and than his death there is no more shameful
+blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean of
+body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the King of Spain.
+
+A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words--as men must ever
+suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth--declared that England had
+not such another head to cut off.
+
+As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of him was
+destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely forthcoming for
+knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the gold coin of
+the realm by the operation known to-day as "clipping," and with him was
+taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness
+against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself
+by purchasing his pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he
+possessed, and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of
+honour.
+
+Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir Walter
+Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration throughout the land,
+and to be commonly known as "Sir Judas." At Whitehall he suffered
+rebuffs and insults that found a climax in the words addressed to him by
+the Lord Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of his office.
+
+"Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men offer
+thyself in my presence?"
+
+For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a man of
+honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered at him.
+
+"What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On my
+soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the
+country would not suffice, so great is the number."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+
+George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria
+
+He was Insolence incarnate.
+
+Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks
+had attracted the attention of King James--notoriously partial to
+good-looking lads--and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to his
+Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a series of
+acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing the vanity and
+levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely was he established in the royal
+favour than he distinguished himself by striking an offending gentleman
+in the very presence of his sovereign--an act of such gross disrespect
+to royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded,
+had not the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly
+maimed.
+
+Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
+greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to
+show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the main planks
+of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his
+head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless,
+insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple
+country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had
+risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
+
+The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that, as
+John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness
+in him--of the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as
+megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect for
+anybody or anything. The Commons of England and the immensely dignified
+Court of Spain--during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at
+Madrid--were alike the butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But
+the crowning insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act
+of which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the banks
+of the river Somme.
+
+Three weeks ago--on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise--Buckingham had
+arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task of
+conducting to England the King of France's sister, Henrietta Maria, who
+three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.
+
+The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of
+his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion
+for ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was
+proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due
+to himself to extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming
+to the Louvre he literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet
+with a short cloak in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with
+diamonds to the value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond
+clasped the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of
+his sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten gold;
+the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on his breast.
+On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of
+intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he moved he shook them off
+like raindrops, and left them to lie where they fell, as largesse for
+pages and the lesser fry of the Court.
+
+His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
+effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth
+of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train. There were
+musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a
+score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six
+outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all
+arrayed as became the satellites of a star of such great magnitude.
+
+Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the
+fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of
+this superb and scintillating ambassador.
+
+Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might
+have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent assurance was
+proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious
+only that what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with
+an air of easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was
+nothing that was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with
+the gloomy Louis XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more
+intoxicated with his very obvious success, he condescended to observe
+approvingly the fresh beauty of the young Queen.
+
+Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be one
+of the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good height and
+carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a ravishing fairness of
+skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness had come to invest with an
+indefinable tenderness her splendid eyes. Her childless marriage to the
+young King of France, which had endured now for ten years, had hardly
+been successful. Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and
+difficult to convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof,
+throwing up between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of
+dislike.
+
+There is a story--and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it--that in the
+early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu had fallen deeply
+in love with her, and that she, with the mischief of an irresponsible
+young girl, had encouraged him, merely to betray him to a ridicule which
+his proud spirit had never been able to forgive. Be that or another
+the reason, the fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected her to
+his vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who by a
+hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King's mind, and thus kept
+ever open the gulf between the two.
+
+The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and admiration
+kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling figure of my Lord of
+Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a figure of romance, a prince out
+of a fairy-tale.
+
+That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his monstrous
+arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of his vanity he
+would add that of the love of a beautiful young queen. Perhaps he was
+thrilled in his madness by the thought of the peril that would spice
+such an adventure. Into that adventure he plunged forthwith. He wooed
+her during the eight days that he abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly,
+contemptuous of courtiers and of the very King himself. At the Louvre,
+at the Hotel de Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother
+held her Court, at the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the
+Queen's side.
+
+Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the Duke's
+cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart, and may even
+have resented that so shallow a man should have been sent to treat with
+a statesman of his own caliber--for other business beside the marriage
+had brought Buckingham to Paris--suggested to the King that the Duke's
+manner in approaching the Queen lacked a proper deference, and the
+Queen's manner of receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore the
+King's long face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he looked
+on. Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl was mere
+incense to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on to greater
+daring.
+
+On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand French
+nobles and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue, quitted Paris to
+accompany Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England, on the first stage of
+her journey to her new home. The King was not of the party. He had
+gone with Richelieu to Fontainebieau, leaving it to the Queen and the
+Queen-Mother to accompany his sister.
+
+Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his attentions
+upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place should be beside the
+carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did not apply to His Insolence of
+Buckingham, so indifferent of whom he might slight or offend. And then
+the devil took a hand in the game.
+
+At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was compelled to
+halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the repose she required.
+Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the presence of three queens at
+one and the same time within its walls, the Duc de Chaulnes gave an
+entertainment in the Citadel. Buckingham attended this, and in the dance
+that followed the banquet it was Buckingham who led out the Queen.
+
+Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop's Palace, where it
+was lodged, and a small company went out to take the evening cool in the
+Bishop's fragrant gardens on the Somme, Buckingham ever at the Queen's
+side. Anne of Austria was attended by her Mistress of the Household,
+the beautiful, witty Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, and by her
+equerry, Monsieur de Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for cavalier that
+handsome coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of Buckingham's creatures,
+between whom and herself a certain transient tenderness had sprung up.
+M. de Putange was accompanied by Madame de Vernet, with whom at the time
+he was over head and ears in love. Elsewhere about the spacious gardens
+other courtiers sauntered.
+
+Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply
+engrossed in their respective companions, or else the state of their
+own hearts and the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them complacently
+towards the affair of gallantry upon which their mistress almost seemed
+to wish to be embarked. They forgot, it would seem, that she was a
+queen, and remembered sympathetically that she was a woman, and that she
+had for companion the most splendid cavalier in all the world. Thus they
+committed the unpardonable fault of lagging behind, and allowing her to
+pass out of their sight round the bend of an avenue by the water.
+
+No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the Queen, that
+the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them from observation,
+than, piling audacity up on audacity, he determined to accomplish here
+and now the conquest of this lovely lady who had used him so graciously
+and received his advances with such manifest pleasure.
+
+"How soft the night! How exquisite!" he sighed.
+
+"Indeed," she agreed. "And how still, but for the gentle murmur of the
+river."
+
+"The river!" he cried, on a new note. "That is no gentle murmur. The
+river laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil."
+
+"Evil?" quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now side
+by side.
+
+"Evil," he repeated. "Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea that soon
+shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing wickedly in the
+pain that will presently be mine."
+
+It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her
+discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether
+she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal
+aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had
+taught her she must ever dwell.
+
+"Oh, but Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, you will be with us again, perhaps
+before so very long."
+
+His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near her
+face that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
+
+"Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your pity,
+say but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear down half a
+world to reach you."
+
+She recoiled in fright and displeasure before a wooing so impetuous and
+violently outspoken; though the displeasure was perhaps but a passing
+emotion, the result of early training. Yet she contrived to answer him
+with the proper icy dignity due to her position as a princess of Spain,
+now Queen of France.
+
+"Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not listen to
+such words. You are mad, I think."
+
+"Yes, I am mad," he flung back. "Mad with love--so mad that I have
+forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the ambassador
+there is a man, under the queen a woman--our real selves, not the titles
+with which Fate seeks to dissemble our true natures. And with the whole
+strength of my true nature do I love you, so potently, so overwhelmingly
+that I will not believe you sensible of no response."
+
+Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little off
+her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true; but also
+a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever addressed her in
+anything approaching this manner, no one had ever so much as suggested
+that her existence could matter greatly, that in her woman's nature
+there was the magic power of awakening passion and devotion. He was so
+splendidly magnificent, so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus
+to lay his being, as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a
+little, who knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to
+repulse him, and the effort was not very convincing.
+
+"Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It ... it
+hurts."
+
+O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he wounded, for
+she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But he in his egregious
+vanity must of course misunderstand.
+
+"Hurts!" he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have warned
+her. "Because you resist it, because you fight against the commands of
+your true self. Anne!" He seized her, and crushed her to him. "Anne!"
+
+Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger, too,
+her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A scream, loud and
+piercing, broke from her and rang through the still garden. It brought
+him to his senses. It was as if he had been lifted up into the air, and
+then suddenly allowed to fall.
+
+He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips, and when
+an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in alarm, his hand
+upon his sword, those two stood with the width of the avenue between
+them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen breathing hard and
+trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as if to repress its tumult.
+
+"Madame! Madame!" had been Putange's cry, as he sprang forward in alarm
+and self-reproach.
+
+He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other in
+bewilderment. Neither spoke.
+
+"You cried out, Madame," M. de Putange reminded her, and Buckingham
+may well have wondered whether presently he would be receiving M. de
+Putange's sword in his vitals. He must have known that his life now hung
+upon her answer.
+
+"I called you, that was all," said the Queen, in a voice that she strove
+to render calm. "I confess that I was startled to find myself alone with
+M. L'Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again, M. de Putange!"
+
+The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from his
+sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions as to
+what must have happened. But he was relieved there were to be no
+complications. The others now coming up with them, the party thereafter
+kept together until presently Buckingham and Lord Holland took their
+leave.
+
+On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was accomplished.
+A little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave of Henrietta Maria,
+entrusting her now to Buckingham and his followers, who were to convey
+her safely to Charles.
+
+It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to Anne of
+Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de Conti for only
+companion.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am come to take my leave."
+
+"Fare you well, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur," she said, and her voice was
+warm and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
+
+"I am come to ask your pardon, madame," he said, in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, monsieur--no more, I beg you." She looked down; her hands were
+trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
+
+He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none might see
+him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld tears in his eyes.
+
+"Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for having
+discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were idle to ask
+pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I can help drawing
+breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the will to live. I gave
+expression to something that dominates my whole being, and will ever
+dominate it as long as I have life. Adieu, madame! At need you know
+where a servant who will gladly die for you is to be found." He kissed
+the hem of her robe, dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and
+was gone before she could say a word in answer.
+
+She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti, watching
+her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
+
+"I will answer for the Queen's virtue," she stated afterwards, "but I
+cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart, since without
+doubt the Duke's tears affected her spirits."
+
+But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he was
+met by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him regarding
+the negotiations he had been empowered to carry out with France in the
+matter of an alliance against Spain--negotiations which had not
+thriven with Louis and Richelieu, possibly because the ambassador was
+ill-chosen. The instructions came too late to be of use, but in time to
+serve as a pretext for Buckingham's return to Amiens. There he sought an
+audience of the Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a futile
+message for the King. This chimerical business--as Madame de Motteville
+shrewdly calls it--being accomplished, he came to the real matter which
+had prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and sought audience
+of Anne of Austria.
+
+It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the levees at
+the Court of France were precisely what the word implies, and they were
+held by royalty whilst still abed. It was not, therefore, amazing that
+he should have been admitted to her presence. She was alone save for her
+lady-in-waiting, Madame de Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged, prudent
+and virtuous. Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of this lady
+upon seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into the room,
+and on his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and bear it to
+his lips.
+
+Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de Lannoi
+became a pillar of icy dignity.
+
+"M. le Duc," says she, "it is not customary in France to kneel when
+speaking to the Queen."
+
+"I care nothing for the customs of France, madame," he answered rudely.
+"I am not a Frenchman."
+
+"That is too obvious, monsieur," snapped the elderly, prudent and
+virtuous countess. "Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps monsieur will
+perceive the convenience of conforming to French customs. Let me call
+for a chair for Monsieur le Duc."
+
+"I do not want a chair, madame."
+
+The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, "I suppose one
+cannot expect anything else in a foreigner," and let him kneel as he
+insisted, placing herself, however, protectingly at the Queen's pillow.
+
+Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi's presence
+no more than if she had been part of the room's furniture, the Duke
+delivered himself freely of what was in his mind. He had been obliged to
+return to Amiens on a matter of State. It was unthinkable that he should
+be so near to her Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her feet;
+and whilst gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her
+matchless perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of
+his soul, allow himself the only felicity life now held for him--that of
+protesting himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the kind,
+did he pour out, what time the Queen, embarrassed and annoyed beyond
+utterance, could only stare at him in silence.
+
+Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a rashness
+beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of
+women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King's ears,
+a tale that must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham,
+in his self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing.
+One suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name
+linked with the Queen's by the lips of scandal.
+
+She found her tongue at last.
+
+"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not necessary,
+it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have
+leave to go."
+
+He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps
+to the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so
+indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and
+reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes,
+and hand on heart--
+
+"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
+
+Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what
+had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken
+place under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip
+wagging. An echo of it reached the King, together with the story of that
+other business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the Duke of
+Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against
+the Queen, sought to feed the King's suspicions.
+
+"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
+Buckingham do to make her cry out?"
+
+"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she did
+cry out."
+
+Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
+abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired
+of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's movements, and the
+fullest particulars of his private life.
+
+Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents
+of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen.
+For he intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long,
+and complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and
+the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the
+Duke's interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which
+followed that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that
+amazingly romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey
+life, touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
+loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in which
+pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was away, overseas;
+she might never see him again; therefore there could be little harm in
+indulging the romantic tenderness he had inspired.
+
+So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--as
+La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the Duke a
+trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That love-token--for it
+amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to the
+Duke.
+
+Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire
+to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he
+at once communicated to France that he was coming over as the ambassador
+of the King of England to treat of certain matters connected with
+Spain. But Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in London
+that portraits of the Queen of France were excessively abundant at York
+House, the Duke's residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform
+the King. Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
+guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride too
+deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an expression of
+Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a form of vain,
+empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
+
+As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of
+Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable as
+Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning this,
+the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason ("well
+known to himself") and in protesting that he would go to France to see
+the Queen with the French King's consent or without it. This was duly
+reported to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most
+Christian Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on
+the part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
+
+Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who
+was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when
+considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria,
+it is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the
+nature of a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted
+upon believing.
+
+Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other
+matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had a bitter and
+secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself there
+had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the Duke.
+Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into
+correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this
+correspondence he managed her so craftily--says La Rochefoucauld--that
+very soon she was, whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most
+valuable spy near Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was
+mainly concerned with information that would throw light upon the real
+relations of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her
+that nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
+of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment the more
+bitter for being stifled--since for her reputation's sake she dared
+not have given it expression--made her a very ready instrument in
+Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of gossip she did not
+carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But all was naught until one
+day at last she was able to tell him something that set his pulses
+beating more quickly than their habit.
+
+She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
+constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the Queen of
+France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her own. Here, indeed,
+was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed.
+Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain possession of the studs,
+the rest would be easy. There would be an end--and such an end!--to
+the King's obstinate, indolent faith in his wife's indifference to that
+boastful, flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the
+time being, and wrote to the Countess.
+
+Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at York
+House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young French
+Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the evening
+Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful, accomplished and
+ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found her charms so alluring
+that he was almost disposed to blame himself for having perhaps treated
+her too lightly. Yet she seemed at pains to show him that it was his to
+take up again the affair at the point at which it had been dropped.
+She was gay, arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that
+presently, yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
+guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the foot
+of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo Jones had just
+completed for him. My lady languished at his side, permitted him to
+encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a moment lay heavily against
+him. He caught her violently to him, and now her ladyship, hitherto so
+yielding, with true feminine contrariness set herself to resist him. A
+scuffle ensued between them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift
+as a doe across the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his
+Grace in pursuit between vexation and amusement.
+
+But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having been
+fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could discern her
+nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that she had desired
+her carriage to be called, and had left York House immediately upon
+coming in from the garden.
+
+He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It was, in
+fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have taken offense
+at that which she had so obviously invited. But then she always had been
+a perverse and provoking jade. With that reflection he put her from his
+mind.
+
+But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the great
+house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident again.
+Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his fine,
+pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-laugh, he rose
+to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him, and brought in his valet
+from an adjoining room. The riband of diamond studs was gone.
+
+Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in the
+moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there pale,
+staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There were upon
+his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one of which could
+have been more easily detached. This was the work of some French agent.
+He had made no secret of whence those studs had come to him.
+
+There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of revelation, he
+saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly contradictory behaviour. The
+jade had fooled him. It was she who had stolen the riband. He sat down
+again, his head in his hands, and swiftly, link by link, he pieced
+together a complete chain.
+
+Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he must
+adopt so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was virtually
+the ruler of England, master in these islands of an almost boundless
+power. That power he would exert to the full this very night to thwart
+those enemies of his own and of the Queen's, who worked so subtly in
+concert. Many would be wronged, much harm would be done, the liberties
+of some thousands of freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot.
+What did it matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should
+cover up an indiscretion.
+
+"Set ink and paper yonder," he bade his gaping valet. "Then go call M.
+Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at once, and leave
+word that I shall require a score of couriers to be in the saddle and
+ready to set out in half an hour."
+
+Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down to
+write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the ports of
+England were closed by the King's express command--delivered by his
+minister, the Duke of Buckingham--that measures were being taken--were
+already taken in all southern ports--so that no vessel of any kind
+should leave the island until the King's further pleasure were made
+known. Startled, the people wondered was this enactment the forerunner
+of war. Had they known the truth, they might have been more startled
+still, though in a different manner. As swiftly as couriers could
+travel--and certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape
+overseas--did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were
+tight locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs which meant the
+honour of the Queen of France.
+
+And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones by
+others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to say which
+were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and Gerbier between
+them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished, and a vessel slipped
+down the Thames, allowed to pass by those who kept close watch to
+enforce the royal decree, and made sail for Calais, which was beginning
+to manifest surprise at this entire cessation of traffic from England.
+From that vessel landed Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying
+the Queen of France the duplicate studs, which were to replace those
+which she had sent to Buckingham.
+
+Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and commerce
+was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-four hours too
+late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of Carlisle. His Eminence
+deplored a fine chance lost through the excessive power that was wielded
+in England by the parvenu.
+
+Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed and
+reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object of his
+desires--go to France and see the Queen. Since the country was closed
+to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of war. Blood should
+flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in the end he would go to
+Paris to negotiate a peace, and that should be his opportunity. Other
+reasons there may have been, but none so dominant, none that could not
+have been removed by negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the
+matter of the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against
+their king.
+
+To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition. Disaster
+and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back in disgrace to
+England, and the Duke found himself more detested by the people than he
+had been already--which is saying much. He went off to seek comfort at
+the hands of the two persons who really loved him--his doting King and
+his splendid wife.
+
+But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
+insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
+long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies and
+mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a nation? He
+desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to accomplish that he
+nothing recked that he should set Europe in a blaze, nothing recked what
+blood should be poured out, what treasure dissipated.
+
+Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his friends,
+fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds, urged him to take
+precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater safety.
+
+But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
+
+"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his contemptuous
+answer.
+
+He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
+the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
+superintending the final preparations for that unpopular expedition,
+John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national vengeance, drove a
+knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.
+
+"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation with
+which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances, there seems
+to have been occasion for the prayer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+
+The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+
+Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black winter's
+night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years, picked his way
+carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light of
+a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed brown seaweed and
+trailing green sea slime. Leaning heavily upon the arm which a sailor
+held out to his assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that rose
+and fell on the heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the
+stones, and the frail craft was pushed off.
+
+The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
+steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were swinging
+rhythmically high up against the black background of the night. The
+elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets, looked behind
+him--to look his last upon the England he had loved and served and
+ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow light upon the jetty
+steps, was all of it that he could now see.
+
+He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing there
+above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl
+of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying
+man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward
+Hyde--whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from
+the finality of death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years
+of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law
+student in the Temple when Charles I. was King.
+
+That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
+desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to place
+the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward
+Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels. The present was not
+to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He had known it, and of a bitter
+sort, in those impecunious days when the Second Charles, whose steps
+he guided, was a needy, homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal
+might have thrown over so profitless a service. He had talents that
+would have commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly
+adhering to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly
+in the Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
+achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the Throne of
+England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours in exile on the
+Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time was that James Stuart,
+Duke of York, debauched his daughter.
+
+Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the Restoration;
+it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was accomplished, took in hand
+and carried out the difficult task of welding together the old and
+the new conditions of political affairs. And it was Hyde who was the
+scapegoat when things did not run the course that Englishmen desired.
+As the head of the administration he was held responsible even for those
+acts which he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde
+who was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the
+money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen was
+childless.
+
+The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to Hyde's
+daughter Anne had now been righted by marriage with the Duke of York.
+Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the people, ever ready
+to attach most credit to that which is most incredible and fantastic,
+believed that to ensure the succession of his own grandchildren Hyde had
+deliberately provided Charles with a barren wife.
+
+When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war at
+Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde was openly
+denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with terror and seeking a
+victim in the blind, unreasoning way of public feeling. They broke his
+windows, ravaged his garden, and erected a gibbet before the gates of
+his superb mansion on the north side of Piccadilly.
+
+Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
+commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those qualities
+of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the masses. Nor did he
+court popularity elsewhere. Because he was austere in his morals,
+grave and sober in his conduct, he was hated by those who made up the
+debauched court of his prince. Because he was deeply religious in his
+principles, the Puritans mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was
+autocratic in his policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of
+autocracy being done.
+
+Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles been half
+as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles. For a time, it is
+true, the King stood his friend, and might so have continued to the
+end had not the women become mixed up in the business. As Evelyn, the
+diarist, puts it, this great man's fall was the work of "the buffoones
+and ladys of pleasure."
+
+It really is a very tangled story--this inner history of the fall of
+Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense, it
+is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine of Braganza,
+his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as much as
+any woman wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio is not a
+natural and proper institution.
+
+If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at
+least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which was
+anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection against
+the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the dowry
+offered--five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which would
+give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the Island
+of Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the
+freedom to trade in the East Indies--which Portugal had hitherto kept
+jealously to herself--were to enable England to build up her great
+Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough
+to make the match desirable.
+
+Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662,
+Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at
+Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall--he stood a full
+six feet high--lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his drawn,
+harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded,
+dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was
+as graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an
+indolent good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.
+
+Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife
+they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of
+an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs that,
+dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale, she had
+the appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him. Her
+complexion was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were fine,
+they were not fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her
+black hair was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great
+ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a pair of
+miniature wings.
+
+It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary,
+with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long
+stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
+
+"Lord!" was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. "They've
+brought me a bat, not a woman."
+
+But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in
+desperate need of money.
+
+"I suppose," he told Clarendon anon, "I must swallow this black draught
+to get the jam that goes with it."
+
+The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he
+coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume to
+rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile
+at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.
+
+Catherine was immediately attended--in the words of Grammont--by six
+frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was
+a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where
+the honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor
+woman--entirely enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had
+married--lived in a fool's paradise.
+
+Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of
+her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King
+Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives de facto Charles
+would people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present wife de
+facto, the mistress of his heart, the first lady of his harem, was that
+beautiful termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger
+Palmer, Earl of Castle-maine.
+
+There was no lack--there never is in such cases--of those who out of
+concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil for her,
+and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's association with my
+Lady Castle-maine--an association dating back to the time when he was
+still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge would appear to have troubled
+the poor soul profoundly; but the climax of her distress was reached
+when, on her coming to Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of
+ladies-in-waiting assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The
+forlorn little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
+that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not to be
+admitted to her presence.
+
+But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered,
+debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature,
+manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation.
+Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife's
+presence, before the whole Court assembled, and himself presented her
+to Catherine, what time that Court, dissolute and profligate as it was,
+looked on in amazement at so outrageous a slight to the dignity of a
+queen.
+
+What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
+stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually her
+face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged pride and
+mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if something snapped within
+her brain under this stress of bitter emotion, blood gushed from her
+nostrils, and she sank back in a swoon into the arms of her Portuguese
+ladies.
+
+Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light of
+love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy skill in
+handling delicate situations could avail him to save his royal dignity.
+
+Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was his
+wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established as one of
+the Queen's ladies--or, rather, since it was her ladyship's wish, and
+since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's hands--it became necessary to
+have the Queen instructed in what was, in her husband's view, fitting.
+For this task he selected Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long
+and loyally played Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide
+him in matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.
+
+Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated with
+Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his Majesty was
+bent.
+
+"Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who shall not
+be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel at her decision in
+this instance."
+
+"Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be revoked."
+
+"By whom, sire?" the Chancellor asked him gravely.
+
+"By her Majesty, of course."
+
+"Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument," said
+Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the
+latter's boyhood. "Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did
+not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you
+are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for
+thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have
+forgotten the things you said then of King Louis."
+
+Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
+invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in
+check.
+
+But anon--no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady
+Castlemaine--he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his
+orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience.
+
+"Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I am sure
+my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady
+Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his
+enemy so long as I live."
+
+My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew
+his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a variety of
+conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that
+Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest
+as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line:
+"Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do
+promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless
+he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that
+he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into
+oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.
+
+Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious
+embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used
+arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to
+himself.
+
+That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys,
+tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk
+of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in
+the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it
+were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.
+
+You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
+Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
+husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
+affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
+Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he
+dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning
+upon her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater
+disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would
+submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.
+
+Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail, prevail
+it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and submitted. And a
+very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was not only installed
+as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find the Queen treating
+her with a friendliness that provoked comment and amazement.
+
+The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
+insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of
+whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware.
+Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is
+inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more
+because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of
+her hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies,
+members of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere
+Chancellor was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked
+to pull him down.
+
+The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain--for
+Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor's
+value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to
+work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance--most
+fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my
+lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to
+my Lord Clarendon's gatepost:
+
+
+                    Three sights to be seen:
+             Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
+
+Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
+Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable
+as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows
+that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to
+mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her how insecure is the
+tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice
+to existence.
+
+And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a
+day when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal lover,
+when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part she owed
+it to an indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure to a child
+of sixteen, of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature
+that still found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of
+a quick and lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either
+by the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was become
+the toast of the day.
+
+This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly come
+to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an impression
+her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys you may
+study in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in the Park
+with the King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine,
+looking, as he tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when
+Miss Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
+she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found its way
+into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more perdurable than
+that of any actual queen) in the figure of Britannia, for which she was
+the model.
+
+Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances
+in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in
+that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to
+inquire whether he were above or below--"below" meaning Miss Stewart's
+apartments on the ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his
+Majesty was a constant visitor. And since where the King goes the Court
+follows, and where the King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted
+that this child now found herself queening it over a court that flocked
+to her apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
+gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
+
+About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
+iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled
+head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
+Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white,
+jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of
+gold that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the game.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played
+in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is
+true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came
+easily by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet
+preserve her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She
+played recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding
+eyes of hers were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of
+the long room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
+gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a vastly
+different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose she could
+find for cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with
+the assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his
+Grace of Buckingham, who was as skilled in this as in other equally
+unstable forms of architecture.
+
+Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather, lounged the
+King, languidly observing this smaller party, a faint, indolent smile on
+his swarthy, saturnine countenance. Absently, with one hand he stroked
+a little spaniel that was curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous,
+plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold--there were
+three or four such attendants about the room--proffered him a cup of
+posset on a golden salver.
+
+The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel
+under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table. Soon he found
+himself alone with her--the others having removed themselves on his
+approach, as jackals fall back before the coming of the lion. The last
+to go, and with signs of obvious reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond,
+a delicately-built, uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
+
+Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards standing
+between them.
+
+Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
+architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled down to a
+mere heap of cards again.
+
+"Symbol of kingly power," said Miss, pertly. "You demolish better than
+you build, sire."
+
+"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong," quoth
+he.
+
+"Pray do. The cards are here."
+
+"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But such is
+not the castle I'll build you if you command me."
+
+"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
+surely."
+
+"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes were oddly
+ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"
+
+Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
+distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
+
+"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
+prove a prison."
+
+She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome, scowling
+eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine looks as if she
+feared that fortune were not favouring her." She was so artless that
+Charles could not be sure there was a double meaning to her speech.
+"Shall we go see how she is faring?" she added, with a disregard for
+etiquette, whose artlessness he also doubted.
+
+He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially with
+beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic urbanity
+with which he sauntered beside her across the room was no more than a
+mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that pretty Frances Stewart
+used him. She always knew how to elude him and, always with that cursed
+air of artlessness, uttered seemingly simple sentences that clung to his
+mind to tantalize him.
+
+"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must prove
+a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to queen before
+she would allow him to build a castle for her?
+
+It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew there
+was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon, which, fearing
+the succession of the former, and, so, of the grandchildren of the
+latter, as a result of Catherine of Braganza's childlessness, strongly
+favoured the King's divorce.
+
+It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be largely
+responsible for the existence of that party. In her hatred for
+Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would slay the
+Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least helped to give
+currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had deliberately chosen for
+Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure the ultimate succession of his
+own daughter's children. But she had never thought to see that slander
+recoil upon her as it now did; she had never thought that a party would
+come to rise up in consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at
+the very moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
+artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
+
+It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that party's
+mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as perhaps it
+did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed. He looked at
+Buckingham, frowning.
+
+"I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England."
+
+The impudent gallant made a leg. "For a subject, sire, I believe I am."
+
+Charles--with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
+compelling than the serious--laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then he
+sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
+
+"It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because
+she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no fault of hers."
+
+He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature shrank
+from purchasing his desires at the price of so much ignominy to the
+Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be necessary to give the
+screw of temptation another turn or two. And it was Miss Stewart herself
+who--in all innocence--supplied what was required in that direction.
+Driven to bay by the importunities of Charles, she announced at last
+that it was her intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve
+herself from the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine
+the uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
+occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so desperate had
+she been rendered that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year who would have her in honour.
+
+You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to bribe
+her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or any title she
+coveted, offering her these things at the nation's expense as freely
+and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into her lap, or the collar
+of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he had put about her neck. The
+offers were ineffectual, and Charles, driven almost to distraction
+by such invulnerable virtue, might now have yielded to the insidious
+whispers of divorce and re-marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a
+hand in the game.
+
+Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
+infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a
+neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered with
+bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the Chancellor had
+recoiled upon herself.
+
+In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost dead, she
+made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the ineffable Chiffinch,
+Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio,
+who was her ladyship's friend, made it and communicated it to her
+There had been one ardent respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that
+proclamation of Miss Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of
+fifteen hundred pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here
+his opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in constant
+attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared the King's
+displeasure.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well served in
+the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came one cold night
+towards the end of February of that year 1667. Charles, going below at a
+late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when he judged that she would be
+alone, was informed by her maid that Miss was not receiving, a headache
+compelling her to keep her room.
+
+His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
+confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine. Chiffinch had
+introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles stiffened at sight
+of her.
+
+"I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage," says she, on a note of
+irony, "although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me at my own
+house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction and grief into
+which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman Stewart has reduced your
+Majesty."
+
+"You are pleased to be amused, ma'am," says Charles frostily.
+
+"I will not," she returned him, "make use of reproaches which would
+disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse frailties in
+myself which nothing can justify, since your constancy for me deprives
+me of all defence." Her ladyship, you see, had a considerable gift of
+sarcasm.
+
+"In that case, may I ask you why you have come?"
+
+"To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made the
+jest of your own Court."
+
+"Madam!"
+
+"Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at for
+the gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the Stewart's
+affectations, any more than you know that whilst you are denied
+admittance to her apartments, under the presence of some indisposition,
+the Duke of Richmond is with her now."
+
+"That is false," he was beginning, very indignantly.
+
+"I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow me,
+you will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes you act so
+ridiculous a part."
+
+She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence led him,
+despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately come. Outside
+her rival's door she left him, but she paused at the end of the gallery
+to make sure that he had entered.
+
+Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
+chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them informing him
+scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been very ill since his
+Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she was, God be thanked, in a
+very fine sleep.
+
+"That I must see," said the King. And, since one of the women placed
+herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty unceremoniously
+took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
+
+He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony into the
+well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the handsome, canopied bed.
+But far from being as he had been told, in "a very fine sleep," she was
+sitting up; and far from presenting an ailing appearance, she looked
+radiantly well and very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with
+golden ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
+sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved upon
+scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
+
+The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid eyes
+lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might have expected
+that he would now deliver himself with that sneering sarcasm, that
+indolent cynicism, which he used upon occasion. But he was too deeply
+stirred for acting. His self-control deserted him entirely. Exactly what
+he said has not been preserved for us. All that we are told is that he
+signified his resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and
+that his Grace, almost petrified by the King's most royal rage, uttered
+never a word in answer. The windows of the room overlooked the Thames.
+The King's eyes strayed towards them. Richmond was slight of build,
+Charles vigorous and athletic. His Grace took the door betimes lest the
+window should occur to his Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with
+the outraged monarch.
+
+Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss Stewart
+faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own, and she was very
+far from attempting any such justification of herself, or her conduct,
+as he may have expected.
+
+"Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your complaint?"
+she invited him challengingly.
+
+That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn. His jaw
+fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this she took the
+fullest advantage.
+
+"If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
+Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am a slave
+in a free country. I know of no engagement that should prevent me from
+disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this is not permitted me in
+your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe there is any power on earth
+can prevent me going back to France, and throwing myself into a convent,
+there to enjoy the peace denied me at this Court."
+
+With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was complete. On
+his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury he had done her. But
+Miss was not in a forgiving humour.
+
+"If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in peace,"
+said she, "you would avoid offending by a longer visit those who
+accompanied or conducted you to my apartments."
+
+She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went home.
+Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak to her
+again, he stalked out.
+
+Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he must
+also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and that in his
+conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely ridiculous. She was
+rightly resolved against being lightly worn by any man. If anything, the
+reflection must have fanned his passion. It was impossible, he thought,
+that she should love that knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no
+graces either of body or of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit,
+it must be, as she had all but said, so that she might be delivered from
+the persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought of
+her marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to Charles,
+and it may have stifled his last scruple in the matter of the divorce.
+
+His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the Court.
+But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The King's messenger
+found him gone already.
+
+Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
+Clarendon's habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke to the
+King--taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary position in which for
+the last twenty-five years he had stood to him--much as he had spoken
+when Charles had proposed to make Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's
+Bedchamber, saving that he was now even more uncompromising. The King
+was not pleased with him. But just as he had had his way, despite the
+Chancellor, in that other matter, so he would have his way despite him
+now. This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too
+much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no effort
+to avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured Queen. So he
+went secretly to work to outwit the King. He made himself the protector
+of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and Miss Stewart, with the result
+that one dark night, a week or two later, the lady stole away from
+the Palace of Whitehall, and made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the
+Bridge-foot, Westminster, where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And
+so, by the secret favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent
+and matrimony.
+
+That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of things in
+his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks later that he
+learnt by whose agency the thing had been accomplished. He learnt it,
+not a doubt, from my Lady Castlemaine.
+
+The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated back to
+the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was at last
+made up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant, and firmly
+established in the amorous King's affections. She had cause to
+be grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her vindictive nature
+remembered only the earlier injury still unavenged. Here at last was her
+chance to pay off that score. Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand,
+yet trusting in the King whom he had served so well, stood his ground
+unintimidated and unmoved--an oak that had weathered mightier storms
+than this. He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil woman.
+And that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told the King
+of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest the King
+should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of consideration for his
+motives, represented him as a self-seeker, and charged him with having
+acted thus so as to make sure of keeping his daughter's children by the
+Duke of York in the succession.
+
+That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw Clarendon to
+the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him with a command that he
+should surrender his seals of office. The proud old man refused to yield
+his seals to any but the King himself. He may have hoped that the memory
+of all that lay between them would rise up once more when they were face
+to face. So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
+deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile throng of
+courtiers--"especially the buffoones and ladys of pleasure," as Evelyn
+says.
+
+Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has left us
+a vivid picture:
+
+"When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine was
+in bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her smock into her
+aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither her woman brought her
+her nightgown; and she stood, blessing herself at the old man's going
+away; and several of the gallants of Whitehall--of which there were many
+staying to see the Chancellor's return--did talk to her in her birdcage;
+among others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of passage."
+
+Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine house in
+Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered Strafford's
+fate, and set out to tread once more and for the remainder of his days
+the path of exile.
+
+Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--reigned
+successively as queens in England.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+
+Count Philip Koenigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+
+He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
+particularly in England, where he had been associated with his brother
+in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century did not
+look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it
+condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip Christof Koenigsmark for
+the sake of his personal beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his
+magnificent address. The court of Hanover made him warmly welcome,
+counting itself the richer for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was
+retained there by the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he
+had been appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
+Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who later
+was to reign in England as King George I.
+
+His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had been
+playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where Koenigsmark had been
+brought up. With adolescence he had gone out into the world to seek the
+broader education which it offered to men of quality and spirit. He had
+fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure
+wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him like an aura.
+Thus Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence
+shone the more brightly against the dull background of that gross
+Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of the
+world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
+
+The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a different
+kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been married in 1682, at
+the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years of wedded life to the
+fulfilment of the handsome promise of her maidenhood. But her beauty was
+spiritualized by a certain wistfulness that had not been there before,
+that should not have been there now had all been well. The sprightliness
+inherent in her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
+bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
+to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a little
+reckless of how or where it offended.
+
+Koenigsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and knew
+enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her thwarted love
+for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted for the sake of
+dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying her to the Electoral
+Prince George the whole of the Duchy of Luneberg might be united.
+Thus, for political reasons, she had been thrust into a union that was
+mutually loveless; for Prince George had as little affection to bring to
+it as herself. Yet for a prince the door to compensations is ever open.
+Prince George's taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and
+this taste he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness
+towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was eventually
+converted into disgust and contempt.
+
+Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on her
+side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by his
+father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the latter by
+the Countess von Platen.
+
+Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of state,
+was--with the connivance of her despicable husband, who saw therein
+the means to his own advancement--the acknowledged mistress of Ernest
+Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and ill-favoured woman.
+Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted face, and peered from her
+mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the Elector Ernest loved her. His son's
+taste for ugly women would appear to have been hereditary.
+
+Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The princess
+had mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not only had she
+never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that detestable woman
+inspired in her, but she had actually given it such free and stinging
+expression as had provoked against Madame von Platen the derision of
+the court, a derision so ill-concealed that echoes of it had reached its
+object, and made her aware of the source from whence it sprang.
+
+It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the elegant,
+romantic Koenigsmark took place. He found the stage set for comedy of
+a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by his recklessness, to
+convert into tragedy.
+
+It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him. It was
+some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he did not lack
+for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-esteem that blinded him
+here to the appalling truth. Yet in the end understanding came to
+him. When the precise significance of the fond leer of that painted
+harridan's repellent coquetry was borne in upon him he felt the skin of
+his body creep and roughen But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal
+scamp, after all, and in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to
+employ his gifts and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as
+to win to eminence. He saw that the Elector's favourite could be of use
+to him; and it is not your adventurer's way to look too closely into the
+nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.
+
+Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so long as
+her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility detrimental. But
+once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was firmly in his grasp,
+and an intimate friendship had ripened between himself and Prince
+Charles--the Elector's younger son--sufficiently to ensure his future,
+he plucked off the mask and allied himself with Sophia in her hostility
+towards Madame von Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter,
+whilst on a visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups
+a droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at Madame
+von Platen's hands.
+
+It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But there was
+one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the Countess, and you
+conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused in her. Her rage was the
+greater for being stifled. It was obviously impossible for her to appeal
+to her lover, the Elector, to avenge her. From the Elector, above all
+others, must the matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would
+she forgo the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere
+all was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer who
+had flouted her be made to pay.
+
+The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more or less
+directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite against Sophia.
+This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into the arms of the Electoral
+Prince. Melusina, who was years afterwards to be created Duchess
+of Kendal, had not yet attained to that completeness of lank, bony
+hideousness that was later to distinguish her in England. But even in
+youth she could boast of little attraction. Prince George, however,
+was easily attracted. A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to
+over-eating, heavy drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina
+von Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as maitresse en-titre
+took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at Herrenhausen, a
+ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.
+
+Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her dullard
+husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her contempt of him now
+left her, yet in the affront thus publicly offered her, she felt that
+the limit of endurance had been reached. Next day it was found that she
+had disappeared from Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at
+Zell.
+
+But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom and
+levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the dignity
+of her rank; recommended her to use in future greater prudence, and a
+proper, wifely submission; and, the homily delivered, packed her back to
+her husband at Herrenhausen.
+
+George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She had
+been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of respect for
+him. She must learn what was due to her station, and to her husband. He
+would thank her to instruct herself in these matters against his return
+from Berlin, whither he was about to journey, and he warned her that he
+would suffer no more tantrums of that kind.
+
+Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
+frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
+
+Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him, and
+leaving hate and despair behind.
+
+It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a true
+friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to rescue her from
+her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her elbow, against this
+dreadful need, Destiny had placed her sometime playmate, her most
+devoted friend--as she accounted him, and as, indeed, he was--the
+elegant, reckless Koenigsmark, with his beautiful face, his golden mane,
+and his unfathomable blue eyes.
+
+Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the formal
+gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and ungraceful as those
+who had built and who inhabited it--she opened her heart to him very
+fully, allowed him, in her overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things
+which for very shame she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She
+kept nothing back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish
+husband, told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
+had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had beaten
+her upon occasion.
+
+Koenigsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of his
+emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when she came at
+last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
+
+"It is enough, madame," he cried. "I swear to you, as Heaven hears me,
+that he shall be punished."
+
+"Punished?" she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him with
+a smile of sad incredulity. "It is not his punishment I seek, my friend,
+but my own salvation."
+
+"The one can be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly, and
+struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of this lout
+as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to Berlin to-night."
+
+The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell apart, as
+she looked at him aghast.
+
+"Why, what would you do? What do you mean?" she asked him.
+
+"I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of you,
+madame."
+
+She shook her head. "Princes do not fight," she said, on a note of
+contempt.
+
+"I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative--unless, indeed,
+he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put an affront
+on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have made him valiant
+enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even that will not answer, and
+he still shields himself behind his rank--why, there are other ways to
+serve him." He was thinking, perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
+
+The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed the
+poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy, and
+starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
+
+"My friend, my friend!" she cried, on a note that quivered and broke.
+"You are mad--wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What would become of
+you if you did this?"
+
+He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
+gesture. "Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become of
+you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service being
+rendered..." He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands and let them
+fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He was the complete
+courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic preux-chevalier all in one.
+
+She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat in her
+white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful face. If ever
+she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss Koenigsmark in that
+moment, but as she might have kissed a loving brother, in token of her
+deep gratitude for his devotion to her who had known so little true
+devotion.
+
+"If you knew," she said, "what balsam this proof of your friendship has
+poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would understand my utter lack of
+words in which to thank you. You dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no
+expression for my gratitude."
+
+"I ask no gratitude," quoth he. "I am all gratitude myself that you
+should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask your leave to
+serve you in my own way."
+
+She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
+
+He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. "Serve me if you
+will--God knows I need the service of a loyal friend--but serve me as I
+shall myself decide--no other way."
+
+"But what alternative service can exist?" he asked, almost impatiently.
+
+"I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place--to quit Hanover,
+never to return."
+
+"But to go whither?"
+
+"Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this hateful
+life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find shelter at Zell,
+as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought of my children, I
+should have fled long ago. For the sake of those two little ones I have
+suffered patiently through all these years. But the limit of endurance
+has been reached and passed. Take me away. Koenigsmark!" She was
+clutching his lapels again. "If you would really serve me, help me to
+escape."
+
+His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
+breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden kindling
+of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones. These sensitive,
+romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion, ever ready to yield to
+the adventure of it.
+
+"My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Koenigsmark while he has
+life." Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still holding them, he
+bowed low over them, so low that his heavy golden mane tumbled forward
+on either side of his handsome head to form a screen under cover of
+which he pressed his lips upon her fingers.
+
+She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough reward
+for so much devotion.
+
+"I thank you again," she breathed. "And now I must think--I must
+consider where I can count upon finding refuge."
+
+That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion was, no
+doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of his horse, and so
+ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom for her with his sword.
+Her sober words dispelled the dream, revealed to him that it was not
+quite intended he should hereafter be her custodian. And there for the
+moment the matter was suspended.
+
+Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered that
+an Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted interview,
+accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-kissings, within
+sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it happened, behind one of
+those windows lurked the Countess von Platen, watching them jealously,
+and without any disposition to construe the meeting innocently. Was she
+not the deadly enemy of both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon
+her, and had not Koenigsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and
+then unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth of
+profligates?
+
+That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the Elector.
+
+"Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour in his
+absence?"
+
+"George's honour?" quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
+Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the notion of
+guarding something whose existence was not easily discerned. He had no
+sense of humour, as his appearance suggested. He was a short, fat man
+with a face shaped like a pear--narrow in the brow and heavy in the
+jowl. "What the devil do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"I mean that this foreign adventurer, Koenigsmark, and Sophia grow too
+intimate."
+
+"Sophia!" Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the line of
+his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent creases expressive
+of contempt.
+
+"That white-faced ninny! Bah!" Her very virtue was matter for his scorn.
+
+"It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly," replied the Countess,
+out of her worldly wisdom. "Listen a moment now." And she related, with
+interest rather than discount, you may be sure, what she had witnessed
+that afternoon.
+
+The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia, and he
+felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to Zell. Then, too,
+being a libertine, and the father of a libertine, it logically followed
+that unchastity in his women-folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.
+
+He heaved himself out of his deep chair. "How far has this gone?" he
+demanded.
+
+Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that might
+afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need, if she could
+trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would presently afford her all
+the evidence required to damn the pair. She said as much, and promised
+the Elector that she would exercise herself the latter quality in his
+son's service. Again the Elector did not find it grotesque that his
+mistress should appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.
+
+The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal--though George's
+honour was the least thing that concerned her. What concerned her was
+the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of Koenigsmark. So she watched
+assiduously, and set others, too, to watch for her and to report. And
+almost daily now she had for the Elector a tale of whisperings and
+hand-pressings, and secret stolen meetings between the guilty twain.
+The Elector enraged, and would have taken action, but that the guileful
+Countess curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could
+not be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the offenders,
+might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing the Duke of Zell to
+his daughter's aid. So they must wait yet awhile until they held more
+absolute proof of this intrigue.
+
+And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the Elector with
+word that Koenigsmark and the Princess had shut themselves up together
+in the garden pavilion. Let him come at once, and he should so discover
+them for himself, and thus at last be able to take action. The Countess
+was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent--and Madame
+von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she
+had seen, conceive it innocent--it was in an Electoral Princess an
+unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none
+would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried
+off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late,
+despite the diligence of his spy.
+
+Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been a
+brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in all
+particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her cousin, the
+Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure--for the sake of what once had
+lain between them--would not now refuse to shelter and protect her. Of
+Koenigsmark she desired that he should act as her escort to her cousin's
+court.
+
+Koenigsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing that
+he regretted. At Wolfenbuttel, having served Sophia faithfully, his
+ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find expression. She would
+make all dispositions, and advise him when she was ready to set out.
+But they must use caution, for they were being spied upon. Madame von
+Platen's over-eagerness had in part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their
+consciousness of espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting
+in the seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
+Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
+
+The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his hands, his
+eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when Ernest Augustus
+burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen lingering just beyond the
+threshold. The Elector's face was apoplectically purple from rage and
+haste, his breath came in wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept
+round the chamber, and fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled
+Koenigsmark.
+
+"Where is the Princess?" he blurted out.
+
+The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had the
+scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of innocent
+mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
+
+"Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?"
+
+At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance over his
+shoulder at the Countess.
+
+"I was told that her Highness was here," he said.
+
+"Plainly," said Koenigsmark, with perfect calm, "you have been
+misinformed." And his quiet glance and gesture invited the Elector to
+look round for himself.
+
+"How long have you been here yourself?" Feeling at a disadvantage, the
+Elector avoided the direct question that was in his mind.
+
+"Half an hour at least."
+
+"And in that time you have not seen the Princess?"
+
+"Seen the Princess?" Koenigsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. "I
+scarcely understand your Highness."
+
+The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked down,
+then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's glove.
+
+"What's this?" quoth he. "Whose glove is this?"
+
+If Koenigsmark's heart missed a beat--as well it may have done--he did
+not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost laughed.
+
+"Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me questions
+that only a seer could answer."
+
+The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously suspicious
+glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid, one of Sophia's
+women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
+
+"What do you want?" the Elector snapped at her.
+
+"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer,
+innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had been too
+hastily dispatched to avert.
+
+The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
+laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to Koenigsmark.
+
+"You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an honest
+man. Will you now tell me without any more of this, precisely what the
+Princess Sophia was doing here with you?"
+
+Koenigsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the furnace of
+the Elector's face.
+
+"Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a prince
+is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady whose spotless
+purity is beyond his understanding. But your Highness can hardly expect
+me to become in never so slight a degree a party to that insult by
+vouchsafing any answer to your question."
+
+"That is your last word, sir?" The Elector shook with suppressed anger.
+
+"Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?"
+
+The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust forth in
+scorn and menace.
+
+"You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard, and as
+that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no reason why your
+sojourn here should be protracted."
+
+Koenigsmark bowed stiffly, formally. "It shall end, your Highness, as
+soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my departure--in a
+week at most."
+
+"You are accorded three days, sir." The Elector turned, and waddled
+out, leaving Koenigsmark to breathe freely again. The three days should
+suffice for the Princess also. It was very well.
+
+The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given this
+troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and placed his
+daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von Platen was the only
+one concerned who thought that it was not well at all, the consummation
+being far from that which she had desired. She had dreamt of a flaming
+scandal, that should utterly consume her two enemies, Sophia and
+Koenigsmark. Instead, she saw them both escaping, and the fact that she
+was--as she may have supposed--effectively separating two loving hearts
+could be no sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
+Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more germane to
+her desires.
+
+The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet confident that
+at worst she could justify it, and little fearing that the worst would
+happen, she boldly went to work. She forged next day a brief note in
+which the Princess Sophia urgently bade Koenigsmark to come to her at
+ten o'clock that night in her own apartments, and with threat and bribe
+induced the waiting woman of the glove to bear that letter.
+
+Now it so happened that Koenigsmark, through the kind offices of Sophia's
+maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in the secret of
+their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that morning, briefly
+stating the urgency of departure, and begging her so to arrange that she
+could leave Herrenhausen with him on the morrow. He imagined the note
+now brought him to be in answer to that appeal of his. Its genuineness
+he never doubted, being unacquainted with Sophia's writing. He was
+aghast at the rashness which dictated such an assignation, yet never
+hesitated as to keeping it. It was not his way to hesitate. He trusted
+to the gods who watch over the destinies of the bold.
+
+And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with having
+dealt too softly with the Dane.
+
+"Bah!" said the Elector. "To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are rid of
+him. Is not that enough?"
+
+"Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already," quoth she.
+
+"Now what will you be hinting?" he asked her peevishly.
+
+"I'll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this. Koenigsmark
+has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this very night at ten
+o'clock--and where do you suppose? In her Highness's own apartments."
+
+The Elector came to his feet with an oath. "That is not true!" he cried.
+"It cannot be!"
+
+"Then I'll say no more," quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin lips.
+
+"Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it suffice
+you that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing this profligate
+you have sufficiently avenged the honour of your son."
+
+"My God, if I thought this were true...." He choked with rage, stood
+shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
+
+"The truth is easily ascertained," said Madame. "Conceal yourself in the
+Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best go attended,
+for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been known aforetime to
+practice murder."
+
+Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men
+together, Koenigsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's
+antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her Highness
+of his visit. Sophia had already retired to bed, and the amazing
+announcement of the Count's presence there startled her into a fear of
+untoward happenings. She was overwhelmed, too, by the rashness of this
+step of his, coming after the events of yesterday. If it should be known
+that he had visited her thus, terrible consequences might ensue. She
+rose, and with Mademoiselle de Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive
+him. Yet for all that she made haste, the precious irreclaimable moments
+sped.
+
+She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
+propriety's sake.
+
+"What is it?" she asked him breathlessly. "What brings you here at such
+an hour?"
+
+"What brings me?" quoth he, surprised at that reception. "Why, your
+commands--your letter."
+
+"My letter? What letter?"
+
+A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He plucked
+forth the treacherous note, and proffered it.
+
+"Why, what does this mean?" She swept a white hand over her eyes and
+brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her vision. "That is
+not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream I should be imprudent as
+to bid you hither, and at such an hour How could you dream it?"
+
+"You are right," said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm,
+perhaps in sheer bitter mirth. "It will be, no doubt, the work of
+our friend, Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest, my
+travelling chaise will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow by the
+Markt Kirck in Hanover, and I shall wait within it. I shall hope to
+conduct you safely to Wolfenbuttel."
+
+"I will come, I will come. But go now--oh, go!"
+
+He looked very deeply into her eyes--a valedictory glance against the
+worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and kissed it,
+and so departed.
+
+He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of stairs,
+and pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He passed
+through, and thrust the door behind him, then stood a moment looking
+round the vast apartment. If he was too late to avoid the springs of
+the baited trap, it was here that they should snap upon him. Yet all was
+still. A single lamp on a table in the middle of the vast chamber shed
+a feeble, flickering light, yet sufficient to assure him that no one
+waited here. He sighed relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set out
+swiftly to cross the hall.
+
+But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the tall
+stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after him.
+
+He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged his
+sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the man who
+for ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to depend upon his
+blade. That swift action sealed his doom. Their orders were to take him
+living or dead, and standing in awe of his repute, they were not the men
+to incur risks. Even as he came on guard, a partisan grazed his head,
+and another opened his breast.
+
+He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright golden
+hair, and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat, yet his right
+hand still desperately clutching his useless sword.
+
+His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike again,
+and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he suddenly beheld
+the Countess von Platen materializing out of the surrounding shadows as
+it seemed, and behind her the squat, ungraceful figure of the Elector.
+He fought for breath. "I am slain," he gasped, "and as I am to appear
+before my Maker I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is innocent.
+Spare her at least, your Highness."
+
+"Innocent!" said the Elector hoarsely. "Then what did you now in her
+apartments?
+
+"It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who..."
+
+The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the lips of
+the dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the halberts finished
+him off, and he was buried there and then, in lime, under the floor of
+the Hall of Knights, under the very spot where he had fallen, which was
+long to remain imbrued with his blood.
+
+Thus miserably perished the glittering Koenigsmark, a martyr to his own
+irrepressible romanticism.
+
+As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared his fate
+that night. She was placed under arrest next morning, and Prince George
+was summoned back from Berlin at once.
+
+The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not suffered,
+for he was disposed to let the matter drop, content that they should
+remain in the forbidding relations which had existed between them before
+this happening. But Sophia was uncompromising in her demand for strict
+justice.
+
+"If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you," she told him. "If innocent, you
+are unworthy of me."
+
+There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
+divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no faintest
+evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content to pronounce the
+divorce upon the ground of her desertion.
+
+She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in vain.
+She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on the Ahlen, to
+drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-two years of life.
+
+Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that on her
+death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to her sometime
+husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months later, as King
+George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that letter was placed
+in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into Germany. It contained
+Sophia's dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn summons to King
+George to stand by her side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a
+year, and there make answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done
+her, for her blighted life and her miserable death.
+
+King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading of
+that letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died in his
+carriage next day--the 9th of June, 1727--on the road to Osnabruck.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
+
+Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her lover in
+the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word--for he never so much
+as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of his existence.
+
+The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld her in
+the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting corollary to her
+action. She in her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil
+martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism and his exultant martyrdom
+upon the altar of Love were alike splendidly futile.
+
+It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It has its
+pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no might-have-been
+which death had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her; because he
+loved her, he died. That is all, but for the details which I am now to
+give you.
+
+The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter of a
+landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chetive noblesse, a man
+of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him
+against the law of entail or primogeniture--the prime cause of the
+inequality out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted
+France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest
+converts to Republicanism--the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding
+constitutional government of the people by the people, holding
+monarchical and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
+
+From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican doctrines to
+which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she rejoiced when the hour
+of awakening sounded and the children of France rose up and snapped the
+fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries by an insolent
+minority of their fellow-countrymen.
+
+In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a transient
+phase--horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion of that
+awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government of
+her dreams would follow--must follow, since among the people's elected
+representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of
+her father's class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by
+a lofty altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party
+presently to be known as the Girondins.
+
+But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least another.
+And this other in the National Assembly was that of the Jacobins,
+less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party in which
+stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as Robespierre,
+Danton,--and Marat.
+
+Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for
+Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned Marat
+and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and thereby
+precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat was
+the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of
+twenty-nine deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled into
+the country, hoping to raise an army that should yet save France, and
+several of the fugitives made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and
+oratory they laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were
+gifted, able men, eloquent speakers and skilled writers, and they might
+have succeeded but that in Paris sat another man no less gifted, and
+with surer knowledge of the temper of the proletariat, tirelessly
+wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of inflaming the passions
+of the mob.
+
+That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime
+professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of
+St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works,
+inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and
+editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had
+bestowed upon him the name borne by his gazette, so that he was known as
+The People's Friend.
+
+Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian
+Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured,
+their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his
+vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine in Paris he spun with
+his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and
+threatened finally to choke them.
+
+He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in
+which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins
+he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of
+the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday--the friend and associate now of
+the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen--he loomed so
+vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young
+mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached
+by the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening
+to corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and
+to replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
+still.
+
+She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to raise an
+army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches of the Jacobins.
+An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw in it a sign that
+Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On the lips of her friends the
+Girondins she caught again the name of Marat, the murderer of Liberty;
+and, brooding, she reached a conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter
+which she wrote about that time.
+
+"As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the friends
+of law and humanity."
+
+From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent it
+was but a step. That step she took. She may have considered awhile the
+proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have come to her with
+realization. She understood that a great sacrifice was necessary; that
+who undertook to rid France of that unclean monster must go prepared for
+self-immolation. She counted the cost calmly and soberly--for calm and
+sober was now her every act.
+
+She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach from
+Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had written:
+
+"I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
+possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in France. On
+leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it I shall no longer
+be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of living together, as it has
+denied us other happinesses. May it show itself more clement to our
+country. Good-by, dear Father. Embrace my sister for me, and do not
+forget me."
+
+That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to
+save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should
+remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the
+Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold
+Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he
+corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the
+monster's death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at the
+hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified,
+she trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great
+tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
+of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
+
+You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of
+this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris
+diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic--1793, old
+style. She was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded
+across her well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown
+hair. She was of a good height and finely proportioned, and her carriage
+as full of dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness
+that a contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was
+gray-eyed, and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face
+squaring a little at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her
+habit, calm her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and
+calm the mind reflected in all this.
+
+And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the open
+country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the errand upon
+which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-receiving mission,
+can shake that normal calm. Here is no wild exaltation, no hysterical
+obedience to hotly-conceived impulse. Here is purpose, as cold as it
+is lofty, to liberate France and pay with her life for the privilege of
+doing so.
+
+That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared her
+ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan moved with
+pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations, sustained by the heady
+wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly indulged, towards a goal of
+triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly in the stuffy diligence with the
+quiet conviction that her days were numbered.
+
+So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one among
+them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous attentions, and
+actually proposed marriage to her before the coach had rolled over the
+bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days later.
+
+She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux Augustine, where
+she engaged a room on the first floor, and then she set out in quest of
+the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of introduction to him from the
+Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she had been on friendly terms at Caen.
+Duperret was to assist her to obtain an interview with the Minister of
+the Interior. She had undertaken to see the latter on the subject of
+certain papers relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an old convent
+friend of her own, and she was in haste to discharge this errand, so as
+to be free for the great task upon which she was come.
+
+From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was ill, and
+confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change of plans, and
+the relinquishing of her project of affording him a spectacular death in
+the crowded hall of the Convention.
+
+The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the business
+of her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose early, and by
+six o'clock she was walking in the cool gardens of the Palais Royal,
+considering with that almost unnatural calm of hers the ways and means
+of accomplishing her purpose in the unexpected conditions that she
+found.
+
+Towards eight o'clock, when Paris was awakening to the business of the
+day and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler's shop in the
+Palais Royal, and bought for two francs a stout kitchen knife in
+a shagreen case. She then returned to her hotel to breakfast, and
+afterwards, dressed in her brown travelling-gown and conical hat, she
+went forth again, and, hailing a hackney carriage, drove to Marat's
+house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine.
+
+But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The Citizen
+Marat was ill, she was told, and could receive no visitors. It was
+Simonne Everard, the triumvir's mistress--later to be known as the Widow
+Marat--who barred her ingress with this message.
+
+Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter to the
+triumvir:
+
+"Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic.
+
+"Citizen,--I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country leads
+me to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the unfortunate events
+which are taking place in that part of the Republic. I shall therefore
+call upon you towards one o'clock. Have the kindness to receive me, and
+accord me a moment's audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering a
+great service to France.
+
+"Marie Corday."
+
+Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late afternoon
+waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of receiving any, she
+wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
+
+"I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter? May I
+hope for a moment's audience? If you have received my letter, I hope you
+will not refuse me, considering the importance of the matter. It should
+suffice for you that I am very unfortunate to give me the right to your
+protection."
+
+Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown--you observe this further
+manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no departure from
+the ordinary habits of life--she goes forth to deliver in person this
+second letter, the knife concealed in the folds of the muslin fichu
+crossed high upon her breast.
+
+In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room of that
+house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, the People's Friend is seated
+in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he is obeying, for in all
+France there is no man more filthy in his person and his habits than
+this triumvir. His bath is medicated. The horrible, loathsome disease
+that corrodes his flesh demands these long immersions to quiet the
+gnawing pains which distract his active, restless mind. In these baths
+he can benumb the torment of the body with which he is encumbered.
+
+For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more--leastways, nothing more
+that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs
+he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of
+personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient
+sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at
+irregular intervals, all have their source in his contempt for
+the physical part of him. This talented man of varied attainments,
+accomplished linguist, skilled physician, able naturalist and profound
+psychologist, lives in his intellect alone, impatient of all physical
+interruptions. If he consents to these immersions, if he spends whole
+days seated in this medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or
+cools the fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend
+his mind to the work that is his life. But his long-suffering body is
+avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been submitted. The
+morbid condition of the former is being communicated to the latter,
+whence results that disconcerting admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and
+exalted sensibility which marked his nature in the closing years of his
+life.
+
+In his bath, then, sat the People's Friend on that July evening,
+immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his emaciated
+body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years of age, dying of
+consumption and other things, so that, did Charlotte but know it, there
+is no need to murder him. Disease and Death have marked him for their
+own, and grow impatient.
+
+A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty wooden
+box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of paper, and two or
+three copies of L'Ami do Peuple. There was no sound in the room but the
+scratch and splutter of his quill. He was writing diligently, revising
+and editing a proof of the forthcoming issue of his paper.
+
+A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in which he
+was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption, until it disturbed
+and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his bath, listened a moment,
+then, with intent to make an end of the interruption, he raised a
+hoarse, croaking voice to inquire what might be taking place.
+
+The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge, entered
+the room. She was fully twenty years younger than himself, and under the
+slattern appearance which life in that house had imposed upon her there
+were vestiges of a certain comeliness.
+
+"There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently to see
+you upon a matter of national importance."
+
+The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in that
+leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old foes of his,
+the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
+
+"She says," Simonne continued, "that she wrote a letter to you this
+morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have told her that
+you will not receive anyone, and..."
+
+"Give me the note," he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust out an
+unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne's hand. He spread
+it, and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his eyes narrowing to
+slits.
+
+"Let her in," he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him without more
+ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone together--the avenger
+and her victim. For a moment each regarded the other. Marat beheld
+a handsome young woman, elegantly attired. But these things had no
+interest for the People's Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of
+beauty? Charlotte beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and
+was full satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
+confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot out.
+
+Then Marat spoke. "So you are from Caen, child?" he said. "And what is
+doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?"
+
+She approached him.
+
+"Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat."
+
+"Rebellion, ha!" It was a sound between a laugh and a croak. "Tell me
+what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their names." He took
+up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
+
+She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him, erect
+and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the Girondins, whilst
+hunched there in his bath his pen scratched briskly.
+
+"So many for the guillotine," he snarled, when it was done.
+
+But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her fichu, and
+as he uttered those words of doom to others his own doom descended upon
+him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by that strong young arm, the
+long, stout blade was buried to its black hilt in his breast.
+
+He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as he
+sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
+
+"Help, chere amie! Help!" he cried, and was for ever silent.
+
+The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the bath at
+the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank sideways in the same
+direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon his right shoulder, whilst
+from the great rent in his breast the blood gushed forth, embruing
+the water of his bath, trickling to the brick-paved floor,
+bespattering--symbolically almost--a copy of L'Ami du Peuple, the
+journal to which he had devoted so much of his uneasy life.
+
+In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
+sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a tigress, she
+sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by the head, and calling
+loudly the while for assistance. Came instantly from the anteroom
+Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of the house, and Laurent Basse, a
+folder of Marat's paper; and now Charlotte found herself confronted
+by four maddened, vociferous beings, at whose hands she may well have
+expected to receive the death for which she was prepared.
+
+Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of it
+across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his fury to
+have battered her to death, but for the arrival of gens d'armes and the
+police commissioner of the district, who took her in their protecting
+charge.
+
+The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became known.
+All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the revolutionary
+rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch upon the house
+wherein the People's Friend lay dead.
+
+That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte Corday lay
+in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude the indignities
+that for a woman were almost inseparable from revolutionary
+incarceration. She preserved throughout her imperturbable calm, based
+now upon a state of mind content in the contemplation of accomplished
+purpose, duty done. She had saved France, she believed; saved Liberty,
+by slaying the man who would have strangled it. In that illusion she
+was content. Her own life was a small price to pay for the splendid
+achievement.
+
+Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her friends,
+in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she had done,
+expounding fully the motives that had impelled her, dwelling upon
+the details of the execution, and of all that had followed. Among the
+letters written by her during those "days of the preparation of peace
+"--as she calls that period, dating in such terms a long epistle to
+Barbaroux--was one to the Committee of Public Safety, in which she begs
+that a miniature-painter may be sent to her to paint her portrait, so
+that she may leave this token of remembrance to her friends. It is only
+in this, as the end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought
+for her own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
+instrument in the hands of Fate.
+
+On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began before the
+Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall as she appeared in
+her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and calm--always calm.
+
+The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of the
+cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
+
+"These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat."
+
+The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to examine
+her.
+
+"What was the object of your visit to Paris?" he asks.
+
+"To kill Marat."
+
+"What motives induced you to this horrible deed?"
+
+"His many crimes."
+
+"Of what crimes do you accuse him?"
+
+"That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive the
+fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator; that he sought
+to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by causing the arrest and
+imprisonment of the deputies to the Convention on May 31st."
+
+"What proof have you of this?"
+
+"The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a mask
+of patriotism."
+
+Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
+
+"Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+Montane shook his head. "You cannot convince anyone that a person of
+your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless instigated by
+some person or persons whom you are unwilling to name."
+
+Charlotte almost smiled. "That shows but a poor knowledge of the human
+heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the strength of
+one's own hatred than upon that of others." And then, raising her voice,
+she proclaimed: "I killed one man to save a hundred thousand; I killed
+a villain to save innocents; I killed a savage wild-beast to give repose
+to France. I was a Republican before the Revolution. I never lacked for
+energy."
+
+What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established. Her
+fearless self-obssession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-Tinville,
+the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her so virginal and
+fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal had not had the best
+of it, he sought with a handful of revolutionary filth to restore the
+balance. He rose slowly, his ferrety eyes upon her.
+
+"How many children have you had?" he rasped, sardonic, his tone a slur,
+an insult.
+
+Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed, disdainful, as
+she answered coldly:
+
+"Have I not stated that I am not married?"
+
+A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the impression he
+sought to convey, and he sat down again.
+
+It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed
+to defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had been
+intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering him to remain
+silent, another from the President bidding him declare her mad.
+
+Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable; it
+satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his client. It
+uttered the whole truth.
+
+"The prisoner," he said, "confesses with calm the horrible crime she has
+committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she confesses its
+most dreadful details; in short, she confesses everything, and does
+not seek to justify herself. That, citizens of the jury, is her whole
+defence. This imperturbable calm, this utter abnegation of self, which
+displays no remorse even in the very presence of death, are contrary
+to nature. They can only be explained by the excitement of political
+fanaticism which armed her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to
+judge what weight that moral consideration should have in the scales of
+justice."
+
+The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full sentence
+of the law.
+
+It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber
+of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but
+she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations.
+She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary
+Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in accordance with her
+request. And during the sitting, which lasted half an hour, she
+conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics, the tranquillity of
+her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death that was so swiftly
+approaching.
+
+The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He carried
+the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination. She showed no
+dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that the time spent with
+Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged for a few moments in
+which to write a note, and, the request being granted, acquitted herself
+briskly of that task, then announcing herself ready, she removed her
+cap that Sanson might cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking
+his scissors, she herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for
+remembrance. When Sanson would have bound her hands, she begged that she
+might be allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by
+the cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat's house. He answered
+that she might do so if she wished, but that it was unnecessary, as he
+could bind her without causing pain.
+
+"To be sure," she said, "those others had not your experience," and she
+proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further demur. "If this
+toilet of death is performed by rude hands," she commented, "at least it
+leads to immortality."
+
+She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and, disdaining
+the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to show herself
+dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce was that rage,
+indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that the tumbril proceeded
+at a crawl, and the people surging about the cart screamed death and
+insult at the doomed woman. It took two hours to reach the Place de la
+Revolution, and meanwhile a terrific summer thunderstorm had broken
+over Paris, and a torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed
+streets. Charlotte's garments were soaked through and through, so that
+her red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
+skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a reflection of
+the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her cheeks, and thus
+heightened her appearance of complete composure.
+
+And it is now in the Rue St. Honore that at long last we reach the
+opening of our tragic love-story.
+
+A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux--sent to Paris by the
+city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention--was
+standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
+accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy
+and of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never practiced
+owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered anatomical
+work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted imagination,
+unhappily married--the not uncommon fate of such delicate
+temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had heard, as all
+Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of the trial, and he
+waited there, curious to see this woman, with whose deed he was secretly
+in sympathy.
+
+The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled up
+around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full of
+life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed upon her,
+standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of those about him,
+he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and paid homage to her. She
+did not see him. He had not thought that she would. He saluted her as
+the devout salute the unresponsive image of a saint. The tumbril crawled
+on. He turned his head, and followed her with his eyes for awhile; then,
+driving his elbows into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a
+passage through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
+gaze, a man entranced.
+
+He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he
+had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in
+the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice
+suddenly rang out.
+
+"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added, addressing
+those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were beautiful to have died
+with her!"
+
+He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that
+moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's attendant,
+who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped the cheek with
+his hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow.
+Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof
+that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.
+
+That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded with
+copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of Republicanism, the
+deliverer of France, in which occurs the comparison with Joan of Arc,
+that other great heroine of France. This was the work of Adam Lux.
+He made no secret of it. The vision of her had so wrought upon the
+imagination of this susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such
+enthusiasm, that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
+expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last moments
+of life she had inspired him.
+
+Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
+urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her act,
+placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately demanded
+for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in this manifesto
+that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term "tyrannicide." That
+document he boldly signed with his own name, realizing that he would pay
+for that temerity with his life.
+
+He was arrested on the 24th of July--exactly a week from the day on
+which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they exerted
+themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and release if he would
+publicly retract what he had written. But he laughed the proposal to
+scorn, ardently resolved to follow into death the woman who had aroused
+the hopeless, immaterial love that made his present torment.
+
+Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor named
+Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that the sight of
+Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a paper on this plea,
+recommending that clemency be shown to the young doctor on the score of
+his affliction, and that he should be sent to a hospital or to America.
+Adam Lux was angry when he heard of this, and protested indignantly
+against the allegations of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la
+Montagne, which published his declaration on the 26th of September, to
+the effect that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his
+anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his sanity.
+
+He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of October,
+when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it joyously, in a mood of
+exultation at his approaching deliverance. He assured the court that he
+did not fear the guillotine, and that all ignominy had been removed from
+such a death by the pure blood of Charlotte.
+
+They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.
+
+"Forgive me, sublime Charlotte," he exclaimed, "if I should find it
+impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness that were
+yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right that the adored
+should be above the adorer."
+
+Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers had
+been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic exaltation. At five
+o'clock that same afternoon he stepped from the tumbril under the gaunt
+shadow of the guillotine. He turned to the people, his eyes bright, a
+flush on his cheeks.
+
+"At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte," he told
+them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the bridegroom on
+his way to the nuptial altar.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights
+Entertainment, Second Series, by Rafael Sabatini
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+by Rafael Sabatini
+
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+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+
+Author: Rafael Sabatini
+
+Release Date: April, 2005  [EBook #7949]
+[This file was first posted on June 4, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Text scanned by J. C. Byers.  Proofreading by Abdulh Ameed Alhassan.
+
+
+
+THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES
+
+by RAFAEL SABATINI
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+David Whitelaw
+
+My Dear David,
+
+Since the narratives collected here as well as in the preceding
+volume under the title of the Historical Nights Entertainment--
+narratives originally published in The Premier Magazine, which
+you so ably edit--owe their being to your suggestion, it is
+fitting that some acknowledgment of the fact should be made. To
+what is hardly less than a duty, allow me to add the pleasure of
+dedicating to you, in earnest of my friendship and esteem, not
+merely this volume, but the work of which this volume is the
+second.
+
+Sincerely yours,
+
+Rafael Sabatini
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the
+Historical Nights Entertainment, issued in December of 1917, has
+encouraged me to prepare the second series here assembled.
+
+As in the case of the narratives that made up the first volume,
+I set out again with the same ambitious aim of adhering
+scrupulously in every instance to actual, recorded facts; and
+once again I find it desirable at the outset to reveal how far
+the achievement may have fallen short of the admitted aim.
+
+On the whole, I have to confess to having allowed myself perhaps
+a wider latitude, and to having taken greater liberties than was
+the case with the essays constituting the previous collection.
+This, however, applies, where applicable, to the parts rather
+than to the whole.
+
+The only entirely apocryphal narrative here included is the
+first--"The Absolution." This is one of those stories which, if
+resting upon no sufficient authority to compel its acceptance,
+will, nevertheless, resist all attempts at final refutation,
+having its roots at least in the soil of fact. It is given in the
+rather discredited Portuguese chronicles of Acenheiro, and finds
+place, more or less as related here, in Duarte Galvao's
+"Chronicle of Affonso Henriques," whence it was taken by the
+Portuguese historical writer, Alexandre Herculano, to be included
+in his "Lendas e Narrativas." If it is to be relegated to the
+Limbo of the ben trovato, at least I esteem it to afford us a
+precious glimpse of the naive spirit of the age in which it is
+set, and find in that my justification for including it.
+
+The next to require apology is "His Insolence of Buckingham," but
+only in so far as the incident of the diamond studs is concerned.
+The remainder of the narrative, the character of Buckingham, the
+details of his embassy to Paris, and the particulars of his
+audacious courtship of Anne of Austria, rest upon unassailable
+evidence. I would have omitted the very apocryphal incident of
+the studs, but that I considered it of peculiar interest as
+revealing the source of the main theme of one of the most famous
+historical romances ever written--"The Three Musketeers." I give
+the story as related by La Rochefoucauld in his "Memoirs," whence
+Alexandre Dumas culled it that he might turn it to such excellent
+romantic account. In La Rochefoucauld's narrative it is the
+painter Gerbier who, in a far less heroic manner, plays the part
+assigned by Dumas to d'Artagnan, and it is the Countess of
+Carlisle who carries out the political theft which Dumas
+attributes to Milady. For the rest, I do not invite you to attach
+undue credit to it, which is not, however, to say that I account
+it wholly false.
+
+In the case of "The _Hermosa Fembra_" I confess to having
+blended together into one single narrative two historical
+episodes closely connected in time and place. Susan's daughter
+was, in fact, herself the betrayer of her father, and it was in
+penitence for that unnatural act that she desired her skull to be
+exhibited as I describe. Into the story of Susan's daughter I
+have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who, like the
+Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover--in this case a youth
+of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment in
+circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the
+judaizing of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore
+word of it at once to Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in
+fact by an interval of three years, and the first afforded Ojeda
+a strong argument for the institution of the Holy Office in
+Seville. Between the two there are many points of contact, and
+each supplies what the other lacks to make an interesting
+narrative having for background the introduction of the
+Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely
+fictitious, and the introduction of Torquemada is quite
+arbitrary. Ojeda was the inquisitor who dealt with both cases.
+But if there I stray into fiction, at least I claim to have
+sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand Inquisitor as I know
+him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life and times.
+
+The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point
+of view of my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a
+historical mystery. The mystery lies, of course, in the man's
+identity. He has been held by some to have been the unfrocked
+monk, Grishka Otropiev, by others to have been a son of Stephen
+Bathory, King of Poland. I am not aware that the theory that he
+was both at one and the same time has ever been put forward, and
+whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I claim that no
+other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of his
+career or to shed light upon its mysteries.
+
+Undoubtedly I have allowed myself a good deal of licence and
+speculation in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The
+Barren Wooing." But the theory that I develop in it to account
+for the miscarriage of the matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth
+and Robert Dudley seems to me to be not only very fully warranted
+by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only theory that will
+convincingly explain the events. Elizabeth, as I show, was widely
+believed to be an accessory to the murder of Amy Robsart. But in
+carefully following her words and actions at that critical time,
+as reported by de Quadra, my reading of the transaction is as
+given here. The most damning fact against Elizabeth was held to
+be her own statement to de Quadra on the eve of Lady Robert
+Dudley's murder to the effect that Lady Robert was "already dead,
+or very nearly so." This foreknowledge of the fate of that
+unfortunate lady has been accepted as positive evidence that the
+Queen was a party to the crime at Cumnor, which was to set her
+lover free to marry again. Far from that, however, I account it
+positive proof of Elizabeth's innocence of any such part in the
+deed. Elizabeth was far too crafty and clear-sighted not to
+realize how her words must incriminate her afterwards if she knew
+that the murder of Lady Robert was projected. She must have been
+merely repeating what Dudley himself had told her; and what he
+must have told her--and she believed--was that his wife was at
+the point of a natural death. Similarly, Dudley would not have
+told her this, unless his aim had been to procure his wife's
+removal by means which would admit of a natural interpretation.
+Difficulties encountered, much as I relate them--and for which
+there is abundant evidence--drove his too-zealous agents to
+rather desperate lengths, and thus brought suspicion, not only
+upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent Queen. The
+manner of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be
+far from what actually took place. The possibility of an
+accident--extraordinarily and suspiciously opportune for Dudley
+as it would have been--could not be altogether ruled out but for
+the further circumstance that Lady Robert had removed everybody
+from Cumnor on that day. To what can this point--unless we accept
+an altogether incredible chain of coincidence--but to some such
+plotting as I here suggest?
+
+In the remaining six essays in this volume the liberties taken
+with the absolute facts are so slight as to require no apology or
+comment.
+
+R. S.
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+     Affonso Henriques, First King of Portugal
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+     Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+     An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+     The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+V. THE END OF THE VERT GALANT
+     The Assassination of Henry IV
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+     The Murder of Amy Robsart
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+     The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+     George Villiers' Courtship of Anne of Austria
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+     The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+     Count Philip Koenigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+     Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat
+
+
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+
+Aftonso Henriques, first King of Portugal
+
+
+
+In 1093 the Moors of the Almoravide dynasty, under the Caliph
+Yusuf, swept irresistibly upwards into the Iberian Peninsula,
+recapturing Lisbon and Santarem in the west, and pushing their
+conquest as far as the river Mondego.
+
+To meet this revival of Mohammedan power, Alfonso VI. Of Castile
+summoned the chivalry of Christendom to his aid. Among the
+knights who answered the call was Count Henry of Burgundy
+(grandson of Robert, first Duke of Burgundy) to whom Alfonso gave
+his natural daughter Theresa in marriage, together with the
+Counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the title of Count of
+Portugal.
+
+That is the first chapter of the history of Portugal.
+
+Count Henry fought hard to defend his southern frontiers from the
+incursion of the Moors until his death in 1114. Thereafter his
+widow Theresa became Regent of Portugal during the minority of
+their son, Affonso Henriques. A woman of great energy, resource
+and ambition, she successfully waged war against the Moors, and
+in other ways laid the foundations upon which her son was to
+build the Kingdom of Portugal. But her passionate infatuation for
+one of her knights--Don Fernando Peres de Trava--and the
+excessive honours she bestowed upon him, made enemies for her in
+the new state, and estranged her from her son.
+
+In 1127 Alfonso VII. of Castile invaded Portugal, compelling
+Theresa to recognize him as her suzerain. But Affonso Henriques,
+now aged seventeen--and declared by the citizens of the capital
+to be of age and competent to reign--incontinently refused to
+recognize the submission made by his mother, and in the following
+year assembled an army for the purpose of expelling her and her
+lover from the country. The warlike Theresa resisted until
+defeated in the battle of San Mamede and taken prisoner.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+He was little more than a boy, although four years were sped
+already since, as a mere lad of fourteen, he had kept vigil
+throughout the night over his arms in the Cathedral of Zamora,
+preparatory to receiving the honour of knighthood at the hands of
+his cousin, Alfonso VII. of Castile. Yet already he was looked
+upon as the very pattern of what a Christian knight should be,
+worthy son of the father who had devoted his life to doing battle
+against the Infidel, wheresoever he might be found. He was
+well-grown and tall, and of a bodily strength that is almost a
+byword to this day in that Portugal of which he was the real
+founder and first king. He was skilled beyond the common wont in
+all knightly exercises of arms and horsemanship, and equipped
+with far more learning--though much of it was ill-digested, as
+this story will serve to show--than the twelfth century
+considered useful or even proper in a knight. And he was at least
+true to his time in that he combined a fervid piety with a
+weakness of the flesh and an impetuous arrogance that was to
+bring him under the ban of greater excommunication at the very
+outset of his reign.
+
+It happened that his imprisonment of his mother was not at all
+pleasing in the sight of Rome. Dona Theresa had powerful friends,
+who so used their influence at the Vatican on her behalf that the
+Holy Father--conveniently ignoring the provocation she had given
+and the scandalous, unmotherly conduct of which she had been
+guilty--came to consider the behaviour of the Infante of Portugal
+as reprehensibly unfilial, and commanded him to deliver Dona
+Theresa at once from duress.
+
+This Papal order, backed by a threat of excommunication in the
+event of disobedience, was brought to the young prince by the
+Bishop of Coimbra, whom he counted among his friends.
+
+Affonso Henriques, ever impetuous and quick to anger, flushed
+scarlet when he heard that uncompromising message. His dark eyes
+smouldered as they considered the aged prelate.
+
+"You come here to bid me let loose again upon this land of
+Portugal that author of strife, to deliver over the people once
+more to the oppression of the Lord of Trava?" he asked. "And you
+tell me that unless by obeying this command I am false to the
+duty I owe this country, you will launch the curse of Rome
+against me? You tell me this?"
+
+The bishop, deeply stirred, torn between his duty to the Holy See
+and his affection for his prince, bowed his head and wrung his
+hands. "What choice have I?" he asked, on a quavering note.
+
+"I raised you from the dust." Thunder was rumbling in the
+prince's voice. "Myself I placed the episcopal ring upon your
+finger."
+
+"My lord, my lord! Could I forget? All that I have I owe to you--
+save only my soul, which I owe to God; my faith, which I owe to
+Christ; and my obedience, which I owe to our Holy Father the
+Pope."
+
+The prince considered him in silence, mastering his passionate,
+impetuous nature. "Go," he growled at last.
+
+The prelate bowed his head, his eyes not daring to meet his
+prince's.
+
+"God keep you, lord," he almost sobbed, and so went out.
+
+But though stirred by his affection for the prince to whom he
+owed so much, though knowing in his inmost heart that Affonso
+Henriques was in the right, the Bishop of Coimbra did not swerve
+from his duty to Rome, which was as plain as it was unpalatable.
+Betimes next morning word was brought to Affonso Henriques in the
+Alcazar of Coimbra that a parchment was nailed to the door of the
+Cathedral, setting forth his excommunication, and that the
+Bishop--either out of fear or out of sorrow--had left the city,
+journeying northward towards Oporto.
+
+Affonso Henriques passed swiftly from incredulity to anger; then
+almost as swiftly came to a resolve, which was as mad and
+harebrained as could have been expected from a lad in his
+eighteenth year who held the reins of power. Yet by its very
+directness and its superb ignoring of all obstacles, legal and
+canonical, it was invested with a certain wild sanity.
+
+In full armour, a white cloak simply embroidered in gold at the
+edge and knotted at the shoulder, he rode to the Cathedral,
+attended by his half-brother Pedro Affonso, and two of his
+knights, Emigio Moniz and Sancho Nunes. There on the great
+iron-studded doors he found, as he had been warned, the Roman
+parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous Latin periods
+set forth in a fine round clerkly hand.
+
+He swung down from his great horse and clanked up the Cathedral
+steps, his attendants following. He had for witnesses no more
+than a few loiterers, who had paused at sight of their prince.
+
+The interdict had so far attracted no attention, for in the
+twelfth century the art of letters was a mystery to which there
+were few initiates.
+
+Affonso Henriques tore the sheepskin from its nails, and crumpled
+it in his hand; then he passed into the Cathedral, and thence
+came out presently into the cloisters. Overhead a bell was
+clanging by his orders, summoning the chapter.
+
+To the Infante, waiting there in the sun-drenched close, came
+presently the canons, austere, aloof, majestic in their unhurried
+progress through the fretted cloisters, with flowing garments and
+hands tucked into their wide sleeves before them. In a semi-
+circle they arrayed themselves before him, and waited impassively
+to learn his will. Overhead the bell had ceased.
+
+Affonso Henriques wasted no words.
+
+"I have summoned you," he announced, "to command that you proceed
+to the election of a bishop."
+
+A rustle stirred through the priestly throng. The canons looked
+askance at the prince and at one another. Then one of them spoke.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," he said gravely, and several instantly made
+chorus: "We have a bishop."
+
+The eyes of the young sovereign kindled. "You are wrong," he told
+them. "You had a bishop, but he is here no longer. He has
+deserted his see, after publishing this shameful thing" And he
+held aloft the crumpled interdict. "As I am a God-fearing,
+Christian knight, I will not live under this ban. Since the
+bishop who excommunicated me is gone, you will at once elect
+another in his place who shall absolve me."
+
+They stood before him, silent and impassive, in their priestly
+dignity, and in their assurance that the law was on their side.
+
+"Well?" the boy growled at them.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," droned a voice again.
+
+"Amen," boomed in chorus through the cloisters.
+
+"I tell you that your bishop is gone," he insisted, his voice
+quivering now with anger, "and I tell you that he shall not
+return, that he shall never set foot again within my city of
+Coimbra. Proceed you therefore at once to the election of his
+successor."
+
+"Lord," he was answered coldly by one of them, "no such election
+is possible or lawful."
+
+"Do you dare stand before my face, and tell me this?" he roared,
+infuriated by their cold resistance. He flung out an arm in a
+gesture of terrible dismissal. "Out of my sight, you proud and
+evil men! Back to your cells, to await my pleasure. Since in your
+arrogant, stiff-necked pride you refuse to do my will, you shall
+receive the bishop I shall myself select."
+
+He was so terrific in his rage that they dared not tell him that
+he had no power, prince though he might be, to make such an
+election, bowed to him, ever impassively, and with their hands
+still folded, unhurried as they had come, they now turned and
+filed past him in departure.
+
+He watched them with scowling brows and tightened lips, Moniz and
+Nunes silent behind him. Suddenly those dark, watchful eyes of
+his were held by the last figure of all in that austere
+procession--a tall, gaunt young man, whose copper-coloured skin
+and hawk-featured face proclaimed his Moorish blood. Instantly,
+maliciously, it flashed through the prince's boyish mind how he
+might make of this man an instrument to humble the pride of that
+insolent clergy. He raised his hand, and beckoned the cleric to
+him.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked him.
+
+"I am called Zuleyman, lord," he was answered, and the name
+confirmed--where, indeed, no confirmation was necessary--the
+fellow's Moorish origin.
+
+Affonso Henriques laughed. It would be an excellent jest to
+thrust upon these arrogant priests, who refused to appoint a
+bishop of their choice, a bishop who was little better than a
+blackamoor.
+
+"Don Zuleyman," said the prince, "I name you Bishop of Coimbra in
+the room of the rebel who has fled. You will prepare to celebrate
+High Mass this morning, and to pronounce my absolution."
+
+The Christianized Moor fell back a step, his face paling under
+its copper skin to a sickly grey. In the background, the hindmost
+members of the retreating clerical procession turned and stood at
+gaze, angered and scandalized by what they heard, which was
+indeed a thing beyond belief.
+
+"Ah no, my lord! Ah no!" Don Zuleyman was faltering. "Not that!"
+
+The prospect terrified him, and in his agitation he had recourse
+to Latin. "Domine, non sum dignus," he cried, and beat his
+breast.
+
+But the uncompromising Affonso Henriques gave him back Latin for
+Latin.
+
+"Dixi--I have spoken!" he answered sternly. "Do not fail me in
+obedience, on your life." And on that he clanked out again with
+his attendants, well-pleased with his morning's work.
+
+As he had disposed with boyish, almost irresponsible rashness,
+and in flagrant contravention of all canon law, so it fell out.
+Don Zuleyman, wearing the bishop's robes and the bishop's mitre,
+intoned the Kyrie Eleison before noon that day in the Cathedral
+of Coimbra, and pronounced the absolution of the Infante of
+Portugal, who knelt so submissively and devoutly before him.
+
+Affonso Henriques was very pleased with himself. He made a jest
+of the affair, and invited his intimates to laugh with him. But
+Emigio Moniz and the elder members of his council refused to
+laugh. They looked with awe upon a deed that went perilously near
+to sacrilege, and implored him to take their own sober view of
+the thing he had done.
+
+"By the bones of St. James!" he cried. "A prince is not to be
+brow-beaten by a priest."
+
+Such a view in the twelfth century was little short of
+revolutionary. The chapter of the Cathedral of Coimbra held the
+converse opinion that priests were not to be browbeaten by a
+prince, and set themselves to make Affonso Henriques realize this
+to his bitter cost. They dispatched to Rome an account of his
+unconscionable, high-handed, incredible sacrilege, and invited
+Rome to administer condign spiritual flagellation upon this
+errant child of Mother Church. Rome made haste to vindicate her
+authority, and dispatched a legate to the recalcitrant, audacious
+boy who ruled in Portugal. But the distance being considerable,
+and means of travel inadequate and slow, it was not until Don
+Zuleyman had presided in the See of Coimbra for a full two months
+that the Papal Legate made his appearance in Affonso Henriques'
+capital.
+
+A very splendid Prince of the Church was Cardinal Corrado, the
+envoy dispatched by Pope Honorius II., full armed with apostolic
+weapons to reduce the rebellious Infante of Portugal into proper
+subjection.
+
+His approach was heralded by the voice of rumour. Affonso
+Henriques heard of it without perturbation. His conscience at
+ease in the absolution which he had wrung from Mother Church
+after his own fashion, he was entirely absorbed in preparations
+for a campaign against the Moors which was to widen his
+dominions. Therefore when at length the thunderbolt descended, it
+fell--so far as he was concerned--from a sky entirely clear.
+
+It was towards dusk of a summer evening when the legate, in a
+litter slung in line between two mules, entered Coimbra. He was
+attended by two nephews, Giannino and Pierluigi da Corrado, both
+patricians of Rome, and a little knot of servants. Empanoplied in
+his sacred office, the cardinal had no need of the protection of
+men-at-arms upon a journey through god-fearing lands.
+
+He was borne straight to the old Moorish palace where the Infante
+resided, and came upon him there amid a numerous company in the
+great pillared hall. Against a background of battle trophies,
+livid weapons, implements of war, and suits of mail both Saracen
+and Christian, with which the bare walls were hung, moved a
+gaily-clad, courtly gathering of nobles and their women-folk,
+when the great cardinal, clad from head to foot in scarlet,
+entered unannounced.
+
+Laughter rippled into silence. A hush descended upon the company,
+which stood now at gaze, considering the imposing and unbidden
+guest. Slowly the legate, followed by the two Roman youths,
+advanced down the hall, the soft pad of his slippered feet and
+the rustle of his silken robes being at first the only sound.
+On he came, until he stood before the shallow dais, where in a
+massively carved chair sat the Infante of Portugal, mistrustfully
+observing him. Affonso Henriques scented here an enemy, an ally
+of his mother's, the bearer of a fresh declaration of hostilities.
+Therefore of deliberate purpose he kept his seat, as if to stress
+the fact that here he was the master.
+
+"Lord Cardinal," he greeted the legate, "be welcome to my land of
+Portugal."
+
+The cardinal bowed stiffly, resentful of this reception. In his
+long journey across the Spains, princes and nobles had flocked to
+kiss his hand, and bend the knee before him, seeking his
+blessing. Yet this mere boy, beardless save for a silky down
+about his firm young cheeks, retained his seat and greeted him
+with no more submissiveness than if he had been the envoy of some
+temporal prince.
+
+"I am the representative of our Holy Father," he announced, in a
+voice of stern reproof. "I am from Rome, with these my well-
+beloved nephews."
+
+"From Rome?" quoth Affonso Henriques. For all his length of limb
+and massive thews he could be impish upon occasion. He was impish
+now. "Although no good has ever yet come to me from Rome, you
+make me hopeful. His Holiness will have heard of the preparations
+I am making for a war against the Infidel that shall carry the
+Cross where new stands the Crescent, and sends me perhaps, a gift
+of gold or assist me in this holy work."
+
+The mockery of it stung the legate sharply. His sallow, ascetic
+face empurpled.
+
+"It is not gold I bring you," he answered, "but a lesson in the
+faith which you would seem to have forgotten. I am come to teach
+you your Christian duty, and to require of you immediate
+reparation of the sacrilegious wrongs you have done. The Holy
+Father demands of you the instant re-instatement of the Bishop of
+Coimbra, whom you have driven out with threats of violence, and
+the degradation of the cleric you blasphemously appointed Bishop
+in his stead."
+
+"And is that all?" quoth the boy, in a voice dangerously quiet.
+
+"No." Fearless in his sense of right, the legate towered before
+him. "It is demanded of you further that you instantly release
+the lady, your mother, from the unjust confinement in which you
+hold her."
+
+"That confinement is not unjust, as all here can witness," the
+Infante answered. "Rome may believe it, because lies have been
+carried to Rome. Dona Theresa's life was a scandal, her regency
+an injustice to my people. She and the infamous Lord of Trava
+lighted the torch of civil war in these dominions. Learn here the
+truth, and carry it to Rome. Thus shall you do worthy service."
+
+But the prelate was obstinate and proud.
+
+"That is not the answer that our Holy Father awaits."
+
+"It is the answer that I send."
+
+"Rash, rebellious youth, beware!" The cardinal's anger flamed up,
+and his voice swelled. "I come armed with spiritual weapons of
+destruction. Do not abuse the patience of Mother Church, or you
+shall feel the full weight of her wrath released against you."
+
+Exasperated, Affonso Henriques bounded to his feet, his face
+livid now with passion, his eyes ablaze.
+
+"Out! Away!" he cried. "Go, my lord, and go quickly, or as God
+watches us I will add here and now yet another sacrilege to those
+of which you accuse me."
+
+The prelate gathered his ample robes about him. If pale, he was
+entirely calm once more. With stern dignity, he bowed to the
+angry youth, and so departed, but with such outward impassivity
+that it would have been difficult to say with whom lay the
+victory. If Affonso Henriques thought that night that he had
+conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion.
+
+He was awakened early by a chamberlain at the urgent instances of
+Emigio Moniz, who was demanding immediate audience. Affonso
+Henriques sat up in bed, and bade him to be admitted.
+
+The elderly knight and faithful counsellor came in, treading
+heavily. His swarthy face was overcast, his mouth set in stern
+lines under its grizzled beard.
+
+"God keep you, lord," was his greeting, so lugubriously delivered
+as to sound like a pious, but rather hopeless, wish.
+
+"And you, Emigio," answered him the Infante. "You are early
+astir. What is the cause?"
+
+"III tidings, lord." He crossed the room, unlatched and flung
+wide a window. "Listen," he bade the prince.
+
+On the still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some
+gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso
+Henriques recognized it for the murmur of the multitude.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked, and thrust a sinewy leg from the
+bed.
+
+"It means that the Papal Legate has done all that he threatened,
+and something more. He has placed your city of Coimbra under a
+ban of excommunication. The churches are closed, and until the
+ban is lifted no priest Will be found to baptize, marry, shrive
+or perform any other Sacrament of Holy Church. The people are
+stricken with terror, knowing that they share the curse with you.
+They are massing below at the gates of the alcazar, demanding to
+see you that they may implore you to lift from them the horror of
+this excommunication."
+
+Affonso Henriques had come to his feet by now, and he stood there
+staring at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart
+clutched by fear of these impalpable, blasting weapons that were
+being used against him.
+
+"My God!" he groaned, and asked: "What must I do?"
+
+Moniz was preternaturally grave. "It is of the first importance
+that the people should be pacified."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"There is one way only--by a promise that you will submit to the
+will of the Holy Father, and by penance seek absolution for
+yourself and your city."
+
+A red flush swept into the young cheeks that had been so pale.
+
+"What?" he cried, his voice a roar. "Release my mother, depose
+Zuleyman, recall that fugitive recreant who cursed me, and humble
+myself to seek pardon at the hands of this insolent Italian
+cleric? May my bones rot, may I roast for ever in hell-fire if I
+show myself such a craven! And do you counsel it, Emigio--do you
+really counsel that?" He was in a towering rage.
+
+"Listen to that voice," Emigio answered him, and waved a hand to
+the open window. "How else will you silence it?"
+
+Affonso Henriques sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his
+head in his hands. He was checkmated--and yet....
+
+He rose and beat his hands together, summoning chamberlain and
+pages to help him dress and arm.
+
+"Where is the legate lodged?" he asked Moniz.
+
+"He is gone," the knight answered him. "He left at cock-crow,
+taking the road to Spain along the Mondego--so I learnt from the
+watch at the River Gate."
+
+"How came they to open for him?"
+
+"His office, lord, is a key that opens all doors at any hour of
+day or night. They dared not detain or delay him."
+
+"Ha!" grunted the Infante. "We will go after him, then." And he
+made haste to complete his dressing. Then he buckled on his great
+sword, and they departed.
+
+In the courtyard of the alcazar, he summoned Sancho Nunes and a
+half-dozen men-at-arms to attend him, mounted a charger and with
+Emigio Moniz at his side and the others following, he rode out
+across the draw-bridge into the open space that was thronged with
+the clamant inhabitants of the stricken city.
+
+A great cry went up when he showed himself--a mighty appeal to
+him for mercy and the remission of the curse. Then silence fell,
+a silence that invited him to answer and give comfort.
+
+He reined in his horse, and standing in his stirrups very tall
+and virile, he addressed them.
+
+"People of Coimbra," he announced, "I go to obtain this city's
+absolution from the ban that has been laid upon it. I shall
+return before sunset. Till then do you keep the peace."
+
+The voice of the multitude was raised again, this time to hail
+him as the father and protector of the Portuguese, and to invoke
+the blessing of Heaven upon his handsome head.
+
+Riding between Moniz and Nunes, and followed by his glittering
+men-at-arms, he crossed the city and took the road along the
+river by which it was known that the legate had departed. All
+that morning they rode briskly amain, the Infante fasting, as he
+had risen, yet unconscious of hunger and of all else but the
+purpose that was consuming him. He rode in utter silence, his
+face set, his brows stern; and Moniz, watching him furtively the
+while, wondered what thoughts were stirring in that rash,
+impetuous young brain, and was afraid.
+
+Towards noon at last they overtook the legate's party. They
+espied his mule-litter at the door of an inn in a little village
+some ten miles beyond the foothills of the Bussaco range. The
+Infante reined up sharply, a hoarse, fierce cry escaping him,
+akin to that of some creature of the wild when it espies its
+prey.
+
+Moniz put forth a hand to seize his arm.
+
+"My lord, my lord," he cried, fearfully. "What is your purpose?"
+
+The prince looked him between the eyes, and his lips curled in a
+smile that was not altogether sweet.
+
+"I am going to beg Cardinal Corrado to have compassion on me," he
+answered, subtly mocking, and on that he swung down from his
+horse, and tossed the reins to a man-at-arms.
+
+Into the inn he clanked, Moniz and Nunes following closely. He
+thrust aside the vinter who, not knowing him, would have hindered
+him, great lord though he seemed, from disturbing the holy guest
+who was honouring the house. He strode on, and into the room
+where the Cardinal with his noble nephews sat at dinner.
+
+At sight of him, fearing violence, Giannino and Pierluigi came
+instantly to their feet, their hands upon their daggers. But
+Cardinal da Corrado sat unmoved. He looked up, a smile of
+ineffable gentleness upon his ascetic face.
+
+"I had hoped that you would come after me, my son," he said. "If
+you come a penitent, then has my prayer been heard."
+
+"A penitent!" cried Affonso Henriques. He laughed wickedly, and
+plucked his dagger from its sheath.
+
+Sancho Nunes, in terror, set a detaining hand upon his prince's
+arm.
+
+"My lord," he cried in a voice that shook, "you will not strike
+the Lord's anointed--that were to destroy yourself for ever."
+
+"A curse," said Affonso Henriques, "perishes with him that
+uttered it." He could reason loosely, you see, this hot-blooded,
+impetuous young cutter of Gordian knots. "And it imports above
+all else that the curse should be lifted from my city of
+Coimbra."
+
+"It shall be, my son, as soon as you show penitence and a
+Christian submission to the Holy Father's will," said the
+undaunted Cardinal.
+
+"God give me patience with you," Affonso Henriques answered him.
+"Listen to me now, lord Cardinal." And he leaned forward on his
+dagger, burying the point of it some inches into the deal table.
+"That you should punish me with the weapons of the Faith for the
+sins that you allege against me I can understand and suffer.
+There is reason in that, perhaps. But will you tell me what
+reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an offence
+which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?--and in punishing it
+by a curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are
+denied those true children of Mother Church, that no priestly
+office may be performed within the city, that men and women may
+not approach the altars of the Faith, that they must die
+unshriven with their sins upon them, and so be damned through all
+eternity? Where is the reason that urges this?"
+
+The cardinal's smile had changed from one of benignity to one of
+guile.
+
+"Why, I will answer you. Out of their terror they will be moved
+to revolt against you, unless you relieve them of the ban. Thus,
+Lord Prince, I hold you in check. You make submission or else you
+are destroyed."
+
+Affonso Henriques considered him a moment. "You answer me
+indeed," said he, and then his voice swelled up in denunciation.
+"But this is statecraft, not religion. And when a prince has no
+statecraft to match that which is opposed to him, do you know
+what follows? He has recourse to force, Lord Cardinal. You compel
+me to it; upon your own head the consequences."
+
+The legate almost sneered. "What is the force of your poor lethal
+weapons compared with the spiritual power I wield? Do you
+threaten me with death? Do you think I fear it?" He rose in a
+surge of sudden wrath, and tore open his scarlet robe. "Strike
+here with your poniard. I wear no mail. Strike if you dare, and
+by the sacrilegious blow destroy yourself in this world and the
+next."
+
+The Infante considered him. Slowly he sheathed his dagger, smiling
+a little. Then he beat his hands together. His men-at-arms came
+in.
+
+"Seize me those two Roman whelps," he commanded, and pointed to
+Giannino and Pierlulgi. "Seize them, and make them fast. About
+it!"
+
+"Lord Prince!" cried the legate in a voice of appeal, wherein
+fear and anger trembled.
+
+It was the note of fear that heartened Affonso Henriques. "About
+it!" he cried again, though needlessly, for already his
+men-at-arms were at grips with the Cardinal's nephews. In a trice
+the kicking, biting, swearing pair were overpowered, deprived of
+arms, and pinioned. The men looked to their prince for further
+orders. In the background Moniz and Nunes witnessed all with
+troubled countenances, whilst the Cardinal, beyond the table,
+white to the lips, demanded in a quavering voice to know what
+violence was intended, implored the Infante to consider, and in
+the same breath threatened him with dread consequences of this
+affront.
+
+Affonso Henriques, unmoved, pointed through the window to a
+stalwart oak that stood before the inn.
+
+"Take them out there, and hang them unshriven," he commanded.
+
+The Cardinal swayed, and almost fell forward. He clutched the
+table, speechless with terror for those lads who were as the very
+apple of his eye, he who so fearlessly had bared his own breast
+to the steel.
+
+The two comely Italian youths were dragged out writhing in their
+captors' hands.
+
+At last the half-swooning legate found his voice. "Lord Prince,"
+he gasped. "Lord Prince . . . you cannot do this infamy! You
+cannot! I warn you that . . . that. . ." The threat perished
+unuttered, slain by mounting terror. "Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as
+you hope for mercy!"
+
+"What mercy do you practice, you who preach a gospe of mercy in
+the world, and cry for mercy now?" the Infante asked him.
+
+"But this is an infamy! What harm have those poor children done?
+What concern is it of theirs that I have offended you in
+performing my sacred duty?"
+
+Swift into that opening flashed the home-thrust of the Infante's
+answer.
+
+"What harm have my people of Coimbra done? What concern is it of
+theirs that I have offended you? Yet to master me you did not
+hesitate to strike at them with the spiritual weapons that are
+yours. To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews
+with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen
+them hang you will understand the things that argument could not
+make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a
+reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart
+will be touched, your monstrous pride abated."
+
+Outside, under the tree, the figures of the men-at-arms were
+moving. Expeditiously, and with indifference, they went about the
+preparations for the task entrusted to them.
+
+The Cardinal writhed, and fought for breath. "Lord Prince, this
+must not be!" He stretched forth supplicating hands. "Lord
+Prince, you must release my nephews."
+
+"Lord Cardinal, you must absolve my people."
+
+"If . . . if you will first make submission. My duty . . . to the
+Holy See . . . Oh God! Will nothing move you?"
+
+"When they have been hanged you will understand, and out of your
+own affliction learn compassion." The Infante's voice was so
+cold, his mien so resolute that the legate despaired of
+conquering his purpose. Abruptly he capitulated, even as the
+halters went about the necks of his two cherished lads.
+
+"Stop!" he screamed. "Bid them stop! The curse shall be lifted."
+
+Affonso Henriques opened the window with a leisureliness which to
+the legate seemed to belong to the realm of nightmare.
+
+"Wait yet a moment," the Infante called to those outside, about
+whom by now a little knot of awe-stricken villagers had gathered.
+Then he turned again to Cardinal Corrado, who had sunk to his
+chair like a man exhausted, and sat now panting, his elbows on
+the table, his head in his hands. "Here," said the prince, "are
+the terms upon which you may have their lives: Complete
+absolution, and Apostolic benediction for my people and myself
+this very night, I on my side making submission to the Holy
+Father's will to the extent of releasing my mother from duress,
+with the condition that she leaves Portugal at once and does not
+return. As for the banished bishop and his successor, matters
+must remain as they are; but you can satisfy your conscience on
+that score by yourself confirming the appointment of Don
+Zuleyman. Come, my lord, I am being generous, I think. In the
+enlargement of my mother I afford you the means of satisfying
+Rome. If you have learnt your lesson from what I here proposed,
+your conscience should satisfy you of the rest."
+
+"Be it so," the Cardinal answered hoarsely. "I will return with
+you to Coimbra and do your will."
+
+Thereupon, without any tinge of mockery, but in completest
+sincerity in token that the feud between them was now completely
+healed, Affonso Henriques went down upon his knees, like the true
+and humble son of Holy Church he accounted himself, to ask a
+blessing at the Cardinal's hands.
+
+
+
+
+
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+
+Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+
+
+
+The news of it first reached him whilst he sat at supper in the
+great hall of his palace in the Kremlin. It came at a time when
+already there was enough to distract his mind; for although the
+table before him was spread and equipped as became an emperor's,
+the gaunt spectre of famine stalked outside in the streets of
+Moscow, and men and women were so reduced by it that cannibalism
+was alleged to be breaking out amongst them.
+
+Alone, save for the ministering pages, sat Boris Godunov under
+the iron lamps that made of the table, with its white napery and
+vessels of gold and silver plate, an island of light in the gloom
+of that vast apartment. The air was fragrant with the scent of
+burning pine, for although the time of year was May, the nights
+were chill, and a great log-fire was blazing on the distant
+hearth. To him, as he sat there, came his trusted Basmanov with
+those tidings which startled him at first, seeming to herald that
+at last the sword of Nemesis was swung above his sinful head.
+
+Basmanov, a flush tinting the prominent cheek-bones of his sallow
+face, an excited glitter in his long eyes, began by ordering the
+pages out of earshot, then leaning forward quickly muttered forth
+his news.
+
+At the first words of it, the Tsar's knife clashed into his
+golden platter, and his short, powerful hands clutched the carved
+arms of his great gilded chair. Quickly he controlled himself,
+and then as he continued to listen he was moved to scorn, and a
+faint smile began to stir under his grizzled beard.
+
+A man had appeared in Poland--such was the burden of Basmanov's
+story--coming none knew exactly whence, who claimed to be
+Demetrius, the son of Ivan Vassielivitch, and lawful Tsar of
+Russia--Demetrius, who was believed to have died at Uglich ten
+years ago, and whose remains lay buried in Moscow, in the Church
+of St. Michael. This man had found shelter in Lithuania, in the
+house of Prince Wisniowiecki, and thither the nobles of Poland
+were now flocking to do him homage, acknowledging him the son of
+Ivan the Terrible. He was said to be the living image of the dead
+Tsar, save that he was swarthy and black-haired, like the dowager
+Tsarina, and there were two warts on his face, such as it was
+remembered had disfigured the countenance of the boy Demetrius.
+
+Thus Basmanov, adding that he had dispatched a messenger into
+Lithuania to obtain more precise confirmation of the story. That
+messenger--chosen in consequence of something else that Basmanov
+had been told--was Smirnoy Otrepiev.
+
+The Tsar Boris sat back in his chair, his eyes on the gem
+encrusted goblet, the stem of which his fingers were mechanically
+turning. There was now no vestige of the smile on his round white
+face. It had grown set and thoughtful.
+
+"Find Prince Shuiski," he said presently, "and send him to me
+here."
+
+Upon the tale the boyar had brought him he offered now no
+comment.
+
+"We will talk of this again, Basmanov," was all he said in
+acknowledgment that he had heard, and in dismissal.
+
+But when the boyar had gone, Boris Godunov heaved himself to his
+feet, and strode over to the fire, his great head sunk between
+his massive shoulders. He was a short, thick-set, bow-legged man,
+inclining to corpulence. He set a foot, shod in red leather
+reversed with ermine, upon an andiron, and, leaning an elbow on
+the carved overmantel, rested his brow against his hand. His eyes
+stared into the very heart of the fire, as if they beheld there
+the pageant of the past, upon which his mind was bent.
+
+Nineteen years were sped since Ivan the Terrible had passed away,
+leaving two sons, Feodor Ivanovitch, who had succeeded him, and
+the infant Demetrius. Feodor, a weakling who was almost imbecile,
+had married Irene, the daughter of Boris Godunov, whereby it had
+fallen out that Boris became the real ruler of Russia, the power
+behind the throne. But his insatiable ambition coveted still
+more. He must wear the crown as well as wield the sceptre; and
+this could not be until the Ruric dynasty which had ruled Russia
+for nearly seven centuries should be stamped out. Between himself
+and the throne stood his daughter's husband and their child, and
+the boy Demetrius, who had been dispatched with his mother, the
+dowager Tsarina, to Uglich. The three must be removed.
+
+Boris began with the last, and sought at first to drive him out
+of the succession without bloodshed. He attempted to have him
+pronounced illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of
+Ivan's seventh wife (the orthodox Church recognizing no wife as
+legitimate beyond the third). But in this he failed. The memory
+of the terrible Tsar, the fear of him, was still alive in
+superstitious Russia, and none dared to dishonour his son. So
+Boris had recourse to other and surer means. He dispatched his
+agents to Uglich, and presently there came thence a story that
+the boy, whilst playing with a knife, had been taken with a fit
+of epilepsy, and had fallen, running the blade into his throat.
+But it was not a story that could carry conviction to the
+Muscovites, since with it came the news that the town of Uglich
+had risen against the emissaries of Boris, charging them with the
+murder of the boy, and killing them out of hand.
+
+Terrible had been the vengeance which Boris had exacted. Of the
+luckless inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by
+his orders, and the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural
+Mountains, whilst the Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for
+having said that her boy was murdered at the instigation of
+Boris, was packed off to a convent, and had remained there ever
+since in close confinement.
+
+That had been in 1591. The next to go was Feodor's infant son,
+and lastly--in 1598--Feodor himself, succumbing to a mysterious
+illness, and leaving Boris a clear path to the throne. But he
+ascended it under the burden of his daughter's curse. Feodor's
+widow had boldly faced her father, boldly accused him of
+poisoning her husband to gratify his remorseless ambitions, and
+on a passionate appeal to God to let it be done by him as he had
+done by others she had departed to a convent, swearing never to
+set eyes upon him again.
+
+The thought of her was with him now, as he stood there looking
+into the heart of the fire; and perhaps it was the memory of her
+curse that turned his stout heart to water, and made him afraid
+where there could surely be no cause for fear. For five years now
+had he been Tsar of Russia, and in these five years he had taken
+such a grip of power as was not lightly to be loosened.
+
+Long he stood there, and there he was found by the magnificent
+Prince Shuiski, whom he had bidden Basmanov to summon.
+
+"You went to Uglich when the Tsarevitch Demetrius was slain,"
+said Boris. His voice and mien were calm and normal. "Yourself
+you saw the body. There is no possibility that you could have
+been mistaken in it?"
+
+"Mistaken?" The boyar was taken aback by the question. He was a
+tall man, considerably younger than Boris, who was in his
+fiftieth year. His face was lean and saturnine, and there was
+something sinister in the dark, close-set eyes under a single,
+heavy line of eyebrow.
+
+Boris explained his question, telling him what he had learnt from
+Basmanov. Basil Shuiski laughed. The story was an absurd one.
+Demetrius was dead. Himself he had held the body in his arms, and
+no mistake was possible.
+
+Despite himself, a sigh of relief fluttered from the lips of
+Boris. Shuiski was right. It was an absurd story, this. There was
+nothing to fear. He had been a fool to have trembled for a
+moment.
+
+Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, he brooded more and
+more over all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that
+the nobility of Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki
+to do honour to this false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris
+found the chief cause of uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow,
+and empty bellies do not make for loyalty. Then, too, the
+Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had ruled too sternly, and
+had curbed their power. There were men like Basil Shuiski who
+knew too much--greedy, ambitious men, who might turn their
+knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to the
+pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a
+messenger to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he
+would yield up the person of this false Demetrius.
+
+But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin
+too late. The pretender had already left the place, and was
+safely lodged in the castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of
+Sandomir, to whose daughter Maryna he was betrothed. If these
+were ill tidings for Boris, there were worse to follow soon.
+Within a few months he learned from Sandomir that Demetrius
+had removed to Cracow, and that there he had been publicly
+acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of Ivan
+Vassielivitch, the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He
+heard, too, the story upon which this belief was founded.
+Demetrius had declared that one of the agents employed by Boris
+Godunov to procure his murder at Uglich had bribed his physician
+Simon to perform the deed. Simon had pretended to agree as the
+only means of saving him. He had dressed the son of a serf, who
+slightly resembled Demetrius, in garments similar to those worn
+by the young prince, and thereafter cut the lad's throat, leaving
+those who had found the body to presume it to be the prince's.
+Meanwhile, Demetrius himself had been concealed by the physician,
+and very shortly thereafter carried away from Uglich, to be
+placed in safety in a monastery, where he had been educated.
+
+Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the
+court of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich
+came forward now to identify with him the grown man, who carried
+in his face so strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That
+story which Boris now heard was soon heard by all Russia, and
+Boris realized that something must be done to refute it.
+
+But something more than assurances--his own assurances--were
+necessary if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last
+Boris bethought him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the
+murdered boy. He had her fetched to Moscow from her convent, and
+told her of this pretender who was setting up a claim to the
+throne of Russia, supported by the King of Poland.
+
+She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes
+and conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When
+he had done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so
+hard in these last twelve years since that day when her boy had
+been slain almost under her very eyes.
+
+"It is a circumstantial tale," she said. "It is perhaps true. It
+is probably true."
+
+"True!" He bounded from his seat. "True? What are you saying,
+woman? Yourself you saw the boy dead."
+
+"I did, and I know who killed him."
+
+"But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set
+the people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him."
+
+"Yes," she answered. And added the question: "What do you want of
+me now?"
+
+"What do I want?" He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated.
+Had the conventual confinement turned her head? "I want your
+testimony. I want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor
+that he is. The people will believe you."
+
+"You think they will?" Interest had kindled in her glance.
+
+"What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a
+mother know her own son?"
+
+"You forget. He was ten years of age then--a child. Now he is a
+grown man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be
+sure of anything?"
+
+He swore a full round oath at her. "Because you saw him dead."
+
+"Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of
+yours who killed him. Yet you made me swear--as the price of my
+brothers' lives--that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken
+than we thought. Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at
+all. Perhaps this man's tale is true."
+
+"Perhaps . . ." He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully,
+searchingly. "What do you mean?" he asked her sharply.
+
+Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that
+once had been so lovely. "I mean that if the devil came out of
+hell and called himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your
+undoing."
+
+Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon
+her wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His
+jaw dropped foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking
+eyes.
+
+"The people will believe me, you say--they will believe that a
+mother should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation
+numbered."
+
+If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he
+was forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the
+weapon with which she could destroy him. The result of it was
+that she went back to her convent under close guard, and was
+thereafter confined with greater rigour than hitherto.
+
+Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining
+ground in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be
+sceptical, but Boris knew that he could not trust them, since
+they had no cause to love him. He began perhaps to realize that
+it is not good to rule by fear.
+
+And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he
+had been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation
+of the rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the
+pretender's real identity.
+
+The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none
+other than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a
+monk, but, unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had
+abandoned himself to licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy
+had been chosen by Basmanov for this particular mission.
+
+The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor
+in proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to
+Sigismund III. to proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to
+demand his expulsion from the Kingdom of Poland; and his
+denunciation was supported by a solemn excommunication pronounced
+by the Patriarch of Moscow against the unfrocked monk, Grishka
+Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself Demetrius Ivanovitch.
+
+But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris
+expected. It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly,
+accomplished man, speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian,
+skilled in horsemanship and in the use of arms, and it was asked
+how an unfrocked monk had come by these accomplishments.
+Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had prevented the Tsarina
+Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives of revenge, he
+had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that,
+actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had
+prevented her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers
+Nagoy repaired to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their
+nephew, and to enrol themselves under his banner.
+
+Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The
+sword of Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out.
+Nothing remained him but to arm and go forth to meet the
+impostor, who was advancing upon Moscow with a great host of
+Poles and Cossacks.
+
+He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They,
+too, had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen
+him slain. Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was
+it possible that Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well
+as the Palatine of Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the
+adventurer, Prince Adam Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false
+Demetrius had first made his appearance, and all those Polish
+nobles who flocked to his banner? Or were they, too, moved by
+some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?
+
+That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time--in the
+winter of 1604--he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent
+them because, crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of
+leading them was denied him. He was forced to stay at home in the
+gloomy apartments of the Kremlin, fretted by care, with the
+ghosts of his evil past to keep him company, and assure him that
+the hour of judgment was at hand.
+
+With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to
+the adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he
+sent Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at
+Dobrinichi, and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which
+compelled him to fall back on Putioli. He lost all his infantry,
+and every Russian taken in arms on the pretender's side was
+remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.
+
+Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed
+and no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of
+the past gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then
+there was ever present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the
+pretender's identity. At last, one evening in April, he sent for
+Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again concerning that nephew of
+his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not good to be the
+uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great prince.
+
+Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white
+face was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had
+lost all its erstwhile firm vigour.
+
+"I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching
+this lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked
+monk, who claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that
+you have made no mistake--are you sure?"
+
+Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his
+mien. But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be
+mistaken. I am sure."
+
+Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His
+terrible eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the
+mental stage in which he mistrusted everything and everybody.
+
+"You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.
+
+"Highness, I swear . . ."
+
+"Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would
+Sigismund of Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you
+say? When I denounced him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev,
+would not Sigismund have verified the statement had it been
+true?"
+
+"The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius . . ."
+Otrepiev was beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.
+
+"Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after--long
+after--my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie.
+Will you stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until
+the rack pulls you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"
+
+"Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these
+years."
+
+"The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the
+whole truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your
+nephew."
+
+And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread.
+"He is not my nephew."
+
+"Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"
+
+Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon
+them before the irate Tsar.
+
+"I did not lie--not altogether. I told you a half-truth,
+Highness. His name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which
+he always has been known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I
+said, and the son of my brother's wife."
+
+"Then . . . then . . ." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he
+understood. "And his father?"
+
+"Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King
+Stephen's natural son."
+
+Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.
+
+"This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of
+course it is true. It is the light at last . . . at last. You may
+go."
+
+Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly.
+He could not know of how little account to Boris was the
+deception he had practiced in comparison with the truth he had
+now revealed, a truth that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon
+the dark mystery of the false Demetrius. The problem that so long
+had plagued the Tsar was solved at last.
+
+This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son
+of Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund
+of Poland and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the
+score of his identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading
+nobles of Poland, knew the man for what he was, and because of it
+supported him, using the fiction of his being Demetrius
+Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and facilitate the
+pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the object of
+it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and a
+Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already
+had sacrificed a throne--that of Sweden--to his devout conscience,
+and he saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not
+heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this
+Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim?
+What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why
+should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne
+of a country devoted to the Greek faith?
+
+At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of
+this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and
+Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an
+elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious
+son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the
+Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had
+fathered--if he had not invented--this fiction that the pretender
+was the dead Demetrius.
+
+Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from
+the first, what months of annoyance might he not have been
+spared; how easy it might have been to prick this bubble of
+imposture. But better late than never. To-morrow he would publish
+the true facts, and all the world should know the truth; and it
+was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this
+superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church,
+who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
+being baited for them.
+
+There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign
+envoys, and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had
+been for many a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was
+now to do, by the conviction that he held the false Demetrius in
+the hollow of his hand. There to those envoys he would announce
+to-night what to-morrow he would announce to all Russia--tell
+them of the discovery he had made, and reveal to his subjects the
+peril in which they stood. Towards the close of the banquet he
+rose to address his guests, announcing that he had an important
+communication for them. In silence they waited for him to speak.
+And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into
+his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face
+empurpling until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his
+mouth and nostrils.
+
+He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel
+and wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting
+aside of earthly vanities, and then he expired.
+
+It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His
+death was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is
+nothing in the manner of it to justify the opinion that it
+resulted from anything other than an apoplexy.
+
+His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow
+to place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this
+lad of sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the
+army, being now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious
+Shuiski, went over at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him
+Tsar of Russia. Thereafter events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched
+on Moscow, entered it in triumph, and again proclaimed Demetrius,
+whereupon the people rose in revolt against the son of the
+usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled the boy and his
+mother.
+
+Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his
+life at the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the
+Muscovites that the boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not
+that of Demetrius, but of a peasant's son, who had been murdered
+in his stead.
+
+That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's
+path, and he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet
+before he occupied it, he showed the real principles that
+actuated him, proved how true had been Boris's conclusion. He
+ordered the arrest and degradation of the Patriarch who had
+denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place appointed
+Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to the
+Roman communion.
+
+On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his
+triumphal entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before
+the tomb of Ivan the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina
+Maria, who, after a brief communion with him in private, came
+forth publicly to acknowledge him as her son.
+
+Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she
+purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had
+been a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was her proper
+due. After all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in
+addition to restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the
+hated Boris Godunov.
+
+His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing
+adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia,
+with Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at
+first all went well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure
+of popularity. If his swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his
+bearing was so courtly and gracious that he won his way quickly
+to the hearts of his people. For the rest he was of a tall,
+graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a knightly address at
+arms.
+
+But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to
+serve two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the
+orthodox Russians whose tsar he was, and on the other there were
+the Poles, who had made him so at a price, and who now demanded
+payment. Because he saw that this payment would be difficult and
+fraught with peril to himself he would--after the common wont of
+princes who have attained their objects--have repudiated the
+debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or at least to evade, the
+persistent reminders that reached him from the Papal Nuncio, to
+whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of the Roman
+faith.
+
+But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different
+terms. The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had
+reached him that Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had
+taken refuge in England, adding that he might be tempted to
+restore the fugitive to the throne of Muscovy.
+
+The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused
+Demetrius to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken,
+which were precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a
+beginning he granted the Jesuits permission to build a church
+within the sacred walls of the Kremlin, whereby he gave great
+scandal. Soon followed other signs that he was not a true son of
+the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by his indifference to
+public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs, and by
+surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he
+conferred high offices and dignities.
+
+And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling
+against him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they
+had been swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat
+Shuiski, who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he
+expected, who resented, above all, to see Basmanov--who had ever
+been his rival--invested with a power second only to that of the
+Tsar himself. Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his
+underground, burrowing fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who
+in their turn wrought upon the populace, and presently all was
+seething disaffection under a surface apparently calm.
+
+The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter
+of the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow,
+the bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and
+the feasting that followed found little favour in the eyes of the
+Muscovites, who now beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.
+
+The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May,
+1606. And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so
+skilfully laid. Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built
+before the walls of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had
+planned for the entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad
+that the fort was intended to serve as an engine of destruction,
+and that the martial spectacle was a pretence, the real object
+being that from the fort the Poles were to cast firebrands into
+the city, and then proceed to the slaughter of the inhabitants.
+
+No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated
+populace. They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May
+they stormed the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski
+himself, to the cry of "Death to the heretic! Death to the
+impostor!"
+
+They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the
+Tsar's bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword
+in hand to bar the way and give his master time to escape. The
+Tsar leapt from a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his
+leg, and lay there helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who
+presently discovered him.
+
+He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius
+Ivanovitch. nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked
+monk.
+
+It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the
+hands of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly
+he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument
+indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris
+Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his
+victims by personating one of them. In that personation he had
+haunted Boris as effectively as if he had been the very ghost of
+the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured, and finally
+broken him so that he died.
+
+That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme
+of human things. And that part being played, the rest mattered
+little. In the nature of him and of his position it was
+impossible that his imposture should be other than ephemeral.
+
+
+
+
+
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+
+An Eposode of the Inquisition in Seville
+
+
+
+Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in
+those early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the
+previous October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand
+and Isabella--had appointed the first inquisitors for Castile,
+ordering them to  set up a Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to
+deal with the apostatizing said to be rampant among the New-
+Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so large a proportion
+of the population.
+
+Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
+of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
+circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that
+they should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos
+and never be found beyond them after nightfall, and that they
+should not practice as doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or
+innkeepers. The desire to emancipate themselves from these and
+other restrictions upon their commerce with Christians and from
+the generally intolerable conditions of bondage and ignominy
+imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and embrace
+Christianity.
+
+But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions
+of faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought.
+Bitter racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never
+extinguished by their conversion.
+
+Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal,
+sinister pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded
+inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--
+headed by a Dominican bearing the white Cross, which invaded the
+city of Seville one day towards the end of December and took its
+way to the Convent of St. Paul, there to establish the Holy
+Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the New-Christians that
+they were to be the object of the attentions of this dread
+tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
+city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the
+Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of
+Arcos.
+
+This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed
+inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth
+that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons
+had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds
+of heretical pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of
+Castile that within fifteen days they should make an exact return
+of the persons of both sexes who had sought refuge in their
+lordships or jurisdictions; that they arrest all these and lodge
+them in the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating
+their property, and holding it at the disposal of the inquisitors;
+that none should shelter any fugitive under pain of greater
+excommunication and of other penalties by law established against
+abettors of heretics.
+
+The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women
+merely because they had departed from Seville before departure
+was in any way forbidden, revealed the severity with which the
+inquisitors intended to proceed. It completed the consternation
+of the New-Christians who had remained behind, and how numerous
+these were may be gathered from the fact that in the district of
+Seville alone they numbered a hundred thousand, many of them
+occupying, thanks to the industry and talent characteristic of
+their race, positions of great eminence. It even disquieted the
+well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all his vain,
+empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known
+perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a
+lineage that went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian
+blood, untainted by any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid
+alleged to flow in Hebrew veins. But it happened that he was in
+love with the daughter of the millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl
+whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was known throughout
+Seville and for many a mile around as la Hermosa Fembra; and he
+knew that such commerce--licit or illicitly conducted--was
+disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the girl had
+been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy
+fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It
+had been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast
+himself the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de
+Susan; it was exasperating to discover now a new and more
+imperative reason for this odious secrecy.
+
+Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more
+aggrieved than that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped
+in his black cloak, he gained the Calle de Ataud on that January
+night.
+
+Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily
+escaladed balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella,
+the delight of her effaced all other considerations. Her father
+was from home, as she had told him in the note that summoned him;
+he was away at Palacios on some merchant's errand, and would not
+return until the morrow. The servants were all abed, and so Don
+Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and lounge at his ease
+upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon him with a
+Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in
+which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her
+bower, a long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and
+taste. The walls were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with
+costly Eastern rugs; on an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-
+beaked lamp of beaten copper charged with aromatic oil shed light
+and perfume through the apartment.
+
+Don Rodrigo sipped his wine, and his dark, hungry eyes followed
+her as she moved about him with vaguely voluptuous, almost feline
+grace. The wine, the heavy perfume of the lamp, and the beauty of
+her played havoc among them with his senses, so that he forgot
+for the moment his Castilian lineage and clean Christian blood,
+forgot that she derived from the accursed race of the Crucifiers.
+All that he remembered was that she was the loveliest woman in
+Seville, daughter to the wealthiest man, and in that hour of
+weakness he decided to convert into reality that which had
+hitherto been no more than an infamous presence. He would loyally
+fulfil the false, disloyal promises he had made. He would take
+her to wife. It was a sacrifice which her beauty and her wealth
+should make worth while. Upon that impulse he spoke now,
+abruptly:
+
+"Isabella, when will you marry me?"
+
+She stood before him, looking down into his weak, handsome face,
+her fingers interlacing his own. She merely smiled. The question
+did not greatly move her. Not knowing him for the scoundrel that
+he was, guessing nothing of the present perturbation of his
+senses, she found it very natural that he should ask her to
+appoint the day.
+
+"It is a question you must ask my father," she answered him.
+
+"I will," said he, "to-morrow, on his return." And he drew her
+down beside him.
+
+But that father was nearer than either of them dreamed. At that
+very moment the soft thud of the closing housedoor sounded
+through the house. It brought her sharply to her feet, and loose
+from his coiling arms, with quickened breath and blanching face.
+A moment she hung there, tense, then sped to the door of the
+room, set it ajar and listened.
+
+Up the stairs came the sound of footsteps and of muttering
+voices. It was her father, and others with him.
+
+With ever-mounting fear she turned to Don Rodrigo, and breathed
+the question: "If they should come here?"
+
+The Castilian stood where he had risen by the divan, his face
+paler now than its pale, aristocratic wont, his eyes reflecting
+the fear that glittered in her own. He had no delusion as to what
+action Diego de Susan would take upon discovering him. These
+Jewish dogs were quickly stirred to passion, and as jealous as
+their betters of the honour of their womenfolk. Already Don
+Rodrigo in imagination saw his clean red Christian blood
+bespattering that Hebrew floor, for he had no weapon save the
+heavy Toledo dagger at his girdle, and Diego de Susan was not
+alone.
+
+It was, he felt, a ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain.
+But his dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another
+moment she had bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the
+chamber's end, a tiny closet that was no better than a cupboard
+contrived for the storing of household linen. She had-moved with
+a swift precision which at another time might have provoked his
+admiration, snatching up his cloak and hat, and other evidences
+of his presence, quenching the lamp, and dragging him to that
+place of cramped concealment, which she remained to share with
+him.
+
+Came presently movements in the room beyond, and the voice of her
+father:
+
+"We shall be securest from intrusion here. It is my daughter's
+room. If you will give me leave, I will go down again to admit
+our other friends."
+
+Those other friends, as Don Rodrigo gathered, continued to arrive
+for the next half-hour, until in the end there must have been
+some twenty of them assembled in that chamber. The mutter of
+voices had steadily increased, but so confused that no more than
+odd words, affording no clue to the reason of this gathering, had
+reached the hidden couple.
+
+And then quite suddenly a silence fell, and on that silence beat
+the sharp, clear voice of Diego de Susan addressing them.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I have called you hither that we may
+concert measures for the protection of ourselves and all New-
+Christians in Seville from the fresh peril by which we are
+menaced. The edict of the inquisitors reveals how much we have to
+fear. You may gather from it that the court of the Holy Office is
+hardly likely to deal in justice, and that the most innocent may
+find himself at any moment exposed to its cruel mercies.
+Therefore it is for us now to consider how to protect ourselves
+and our property from the unscrupulous activities of this
+tribunal. You are the principal New Christian citizens of
+Seville; you are wealthy, not only in property, but also in the
+goodwill of the people, who trust and respect, and at need will
+follow, you. If nothing less will serve, we must have recourse to
+arms; and so that we are resolute and united, my friends, we
+shall prevail against the inquisitors."
+
+Within the alcove, Don Rodrigo felt his skin roughening with
+horror at this speech, which breathed sedition not only against
+the Sovereigns, but against the very Church. And with his horror
+was blent a certain increase of fear. If his situation had been
+perilous before, it was tenfold more dangerous now. Discovery,
+since he had overheard this treason, must mean his certain death.
+And Isabella, realizing the same to the exclusion of all else,
+clutched his arm and cowered against him in the dark.
+
+There was worse to follow. Susan's address was received with a
+murmur of applause, and then others spoke, and several were
+named, and their presence thus disclosed. There was the
+influential Manuel Sauli, who next to Susan was the wealthiest
+man in Seville; there was Torralba, the Governor of Triana; Juan
+Abolafio, the farmer of the royal customs, and his brother
+Fernandez, the licentiate, and there were others--all of them men
+of substance, some even holding office under the Crown. Not one
+was there who dissented from anything that Susan had said; rather
+did each contribute some spur to the general resolve. In the end
+it was concerted that each of those present should engage himself
+to raise a proportion of the men, arms and money that would be
+needed for their enterprise. And upon that the meeting was
+dissolved, and they departed. Susan himself went with them. He
+had work to do in the common cause, he announced, and he would do
+it that very night in which it was supposed that he was absent at
+Palacios.
+
+At last, when all had gone, and the house was still again,
+Isabella and her lover crept forth from their concealment, and in
+the light of the lamp which Susan had left burning each looked
+into the other's white, startled face. So shaken was Don Rodrigo
+with horror of what he had overheard, and with the terror of
+discovery, that it was with difficulty he kept his teeth from
+chattering.
+
+"Heaven protect us!" he gasped. "What Judaizing was this?"
+
+"Judaizing!" she echoed. It was the term applied to apostacy, to
+the relapse of New-Christians to Judaism, an offense to be
+expiated at the stake. "Here was no Judaizing. Are you mad,
+Rodrigo? You heard no single word that sinned against the
+Faith."
+
+"Did I not? I heard treason enough to."
+
+"No, nor treason either. You heard honourable, upright men
+considering measures of defence against oppression, injustice,
+and evil acquisitiveness masquerading in the holy garments of
+religion."
+
+He stared askance at her for a moment, then his full lips curled
+into a sneer. "Of course you would seek to justify them," he said.
+"You are of that foul brood yourself. But you cannot think to
+cozen me, who am of clean Old-christian blood and a true son of
+Mother Church. These men plot evil against the Holy Inquisition.
+Is that not Judaizing when it is done by Jews?"
+
+She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from
+her great dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult.
+Yet still she sought to reason with him.
+
+"They are not Jews--not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in
+holy orders. All of them are Christians, and . . ."
+
+"Newly-baptized!" he broke in, sneering viciously. "A defilement
+of that holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is
+revealed by what passed here just now. Jews they were born, the
+sons of Jews, and Jews they remain under their cloak of mock
+Christianity, to be damned as Jews in the end." He was panting
+now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal inflamed this profligate
+defiler. "God forgive me that ever I entered here. Yet I do
+believe that it was His will that I should come to overhear what
+is being plotted. Let me depart from hence."
+
+With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the
+door. Her clutch upon his arm arrested him.
+
+"Whither do you go?" she asked trim sharply. He looked now into
+her eyes, and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw
+nothing of the hatred into which her love had been transmuted in
+that moment by his unsparing insults to herself, her race and her
+home, by the purpose which she clearly read in him.
+
+"Whither?" he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
+
+"Whither my Christian duty bids me."
+
+It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her
+purpose, she had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle,
+and armed with it stood between the door and him.
+
+"A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven
+watches us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must
+talk awhile before you go."
+
+Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine
+religious zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak
+woman's hand. Rapidly to-night was she coming into real knowledge
+of this Castilian gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for
+her lover. It was a knowledge that was to sear her presently with
+self-loathing and self-contempt. But for the moment her only
+consideration was that, as a direct result of her own wantonness,
+her father stood in mortal peril. If he should perish through the
+deletion of this creature, she would account herself his slayer.
+
+"You have not considered that the deletion you intend will
+destroy my father," she said quietly.
+
+"There is my Christian duty to consider," answered he, but
+without boldness now.
+
+"Perhaps. But there is something you must set against it. Have
+you no duty as a lover--no duty to me?"
+
+"No earthly duty can weigh against a spiritual obligation. . . ."
+
+"Ah, wait! Have patience. You have not well considered, that is
+plain. In coming here in secret you wronged my father. You will
+not trouble to deny it.
+
+"Jointly we wronged him, you and I. Will you then take advantage
+of something learnt whilst you were hiding there like a thief
+from the consequences of what you did, and so do him yet this
+further wrong?"
+
+"Must I wrong my conscience?" he asked her sullenly.
+
+"Indeed, I fear you must."
+
+"Imperil my immortal soul?" He almost laughed.
+
+"You talk in vain."
+
+"But I have something more than words for you." With her left
+hand she drew upon the fine gold chain about her neck, and
+brought forth a tiny jewelled cross. Passing the chain over her
+head, she held it out.
+
+"Take this," she bade him. "Take it, I say. Now, with that sacred
+symbol in your hand, make solemn oath to divulge no word of what
+you have learnt here tonight, or else resign yourself to an
+unshriven death. For either you take that oath, or I rouse the
+servants and have you dealt with as one who has intruded here
+unbidden for an evil end." She backed away from him as she spoke,
+and threw wide the door. Then, confronting him from the
+threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder than a
+whisper. "Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with
+all your sins upon you, and so destroy for all eternity the
+immortal soul that urges you to this betrayal, or will you take
+the oath that I require?"
+
+He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she
+cut him short. "For the last time!"  she bade him. "Will you
+decide?"
+
+He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
+conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the
+words of the formidable oath that she administered an oath which
+it must damn his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because
+she imagined that she had taken the measure of his faith, she
+returned him his dagger, and let him go at last. She imagined
+that she had bound him fast in irrefragable spiritual bonds.
+
+And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had
+been present at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by
+order of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, she still clung to
+that belief. Yet presently a doubt crept in, a doubt that she
+must at all costs resolve. And so presently she called for her
+litter, and had herself carried to the Convent of St. Paul, where
+she asked to see Frey Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the
+Dominicans of Seville.
+
+She was left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room
+pervaded by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple
+of chairs and a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great,
+gaunt crucifix hanging upon one of its whitewashed walls.
+
+Thither came presently two Dominican friars. One of these was a
+harsh-featured man of middle height and square build, the
+uncompromising zealot Ojeda. The other was tall and lean,
+stooping slightly at the shoulders, haggard and pale of
+countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark eyes, and a tender,
+wistful mouth. This was the Queen's confessor, Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her,
+leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her
+with eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
+
+"You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan," he
+said, in a gentle voice. "God help and strengthen you, my child,
+against the trials that may be in store for you. What do you seek
+at our poor hands? Speak, child, without fear."
+
+"Father," she faltered, "I come to implore your pity."
+
+"No need to implore it, child. Should I withhold pity who stand
+myself in need of pity, being a sinner--as are we all."
+
+"It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy."
+
+"So I supposed." A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the
+tender melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. "If
+your father is innocent of what has been alleged against him, the
+benign tribunal of the Holy Office will bring his innocence to
+light, and rejoice therein; if he is guilty, if he has strayed--
+as we may all stray unless fortified by heavenly grace--he shall
+be given the means of expiation, that his salvation may be
+assured him."
+
+She shivered at the words. She knew the mercy in which the
+inquisitors dealt, a mercy so spiritual that it took no account
+of the temporal agonies inflicted to ensure it.
+
+"My father is innocent of any sin against the Faith," said she.
+
+"Are you so sure?" croaked the harsh voice of Ojeda, breaking in.
+"Consider well. Remember that your duty as a Christian is above
+your duty as a daughter."
+
+Almost had she bluntly demanded the name of her father's accuser,
+that thus she might reach the object of her visit. Betimes she
+checked the rash impulse, perceiving that subtlety was here
+required; that a direct question would close the door to all
+information. Skilfully, then, she chose her line of attack.
+
+"I am sure," she exclaimed, "that he is a more fervent and pious
+Christian--New-Christian though he be--than his accuser."
+
+The wistfulness faded from Torquemada's eyes. They grew keen, as
+became the eyes of an inquisitor, the eyes of a sleuth, quick to
+fasten on a spoor. But he shook his head.
+
+Ojeda advanced. "That I cannot believe," said he. "The deletion
+was made from a sense of duty so pure that the delator did not
+hesitate to confess the sin of his own commission through which
+he had discovered the treachery of Don Diego and his associates."
+
+She could have cried out in anguish at this answer to her
+unspoken question. Yet she controlled herself, and that no single
+doubt should linger, she thrust boldly home.
+
+"He confessed it?" she cried, seemingly aghast. The friar slowly
+nodded. "Don Rodrigo confessed?" she insisted, as will the
+incredulous.
+
+Abruptly the friar nodded again; and as abruptly checked,
+recollecting himself.
+
+"Don Rodrigo?" he echoed, and asked: "Who mentioned Don Rodrigo?"
+
+But it was too late. His assenting nod had betrayed the truth,
+had confirmed her worst fear. She swayed a little; the room swam
+round her, she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation
+against that forsworn betrayer surged to revive her. If it was
+through her weakness and undutifulness that her father had been
+destroyed, through her strength should he be avenged, though in
+doing so she pulled down and destroyed herself.
+
+"And he confessed to his own sin?" she was repeating slowly, ever
+on that musing, incredulous note. "He dared confess himself a
+Judaizer?"
+
+"A Judaizer!" Sheer horror now overspread the friar's grim
+countenance. "A Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!"
+
+"But I thought you said he had confessed."
+
+"Why, yes, but . . . but not to that." Her pale lips smiled,
+sadly contemptuous.
+
+"I see. He set limits of prudence upon his confession. He left
+out his Judatting practices. He did not tell you, for instance,
+that this deletion was an act of revenge against me who refused
+to marry him, having discovered his unfaith, and fearing its
+consequences in this world and the next."
+
+Ojeda stared at her in sheer, incredulous amazement.
+
+And then Torquemada spoke: "Do you say that Don Rodrigo de
+Cardona is a Judaizer? Oh, it is unbelievable."
+
+"Yet I could give you evidence that should convince you."
+
+"Then so you shall. It is your sacred duty, lest you become an
+abettor of heresy, and yourself liable to the extreme penalty."
+
+It would be a half-hour later, perhaps, when she quitted the
+Convent of St. Paul to return home, with Hell in her heart,
+knowing in life no purpose but that of avenging the parent her
+folly had destroyed. As she was being carried past the Alcazar,
+she espied across the open space a tall, slim figure in black, in
+whom she recognized her lover, and straightway she sent the page
+who paced beside her litter to call him to her side. The summons
+surprised him after what had passed between them; moreover,
+considering her father's present condition, he was reluctant to
+be seen in attendance upon the beautiful, wealthy Isabella de
+Susan. Nevertheless, urged on by curiosity, he went.
+
+Her greeting increased his surprise.
+
+"I am in deep distress, Rodrigo, as you may judge," she told him
+sadly. "You will have heard what has befallen my father?"
+
+He looked at her sharply, yet saw nothing but loveliness rendered
+more appealing by sorrow. Clearly she did not suspect him of
+betrayal; did not realize that an oath extorted by violence--and
+an oath, moreover, to be false to a sacred duty--could not be
+accounted binding.
+
+"I . . . I heard of it an hour ago," he lied a thought
+unsteadily. "I . . . I commiserate you deeply."
+
+"I deserve commiseration," answered she, "and so does my poor
+father, and those others. It is plain that amongst those he
+trusted there was a traitor, a spy, who went straight from that
+meeting to inform against them. If I but had a list it were easy
+to discover the betrayer. One need but ascertain who is the one
+of all who were present whose arrest has been omitted." Her
+lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. "What is to become
+of me now, alone in the world?" she asked him. "My father was
+my only friend."
+
+The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw
+here a noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.
+
+"Your only friend?" he asked her thickly. "Was there no one else?
+Is there no one else, Isabella?"
+
+"There was," she said, and sighed heavily. "But after what befell
+last night, when . . . You know what is in my mind. I was
+distraught then, mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so
+that I could not even consider his sin in its full heinousness,
+nor see how righteous was your intent to inform against him. Yet
+I am thankful that it was not by your deletion that he was taken.
+The thought of that is to-day my only consolation."
+
+They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm
+to assist her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to
+accompany her within. But she denied him.
+
+"Not now--though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will
+come and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more
+able to receive you--that is, if I am forgiven for . . ."
+
+"Not another word," he begged her. "I honour you for what you
+did. It is I who should sue to you for forgiveness."
+
+"You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!" And
+so she left him.
+
+She had found him--had she but known it--a dejected, miserable
+man in the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying
+Susan he had acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage,
+and partly from a sense of religious duty. In counting later the
+cost to himself, he cursed the folly of his rage, and began to
+wonder if such strict observance of religious duty was really
+worth while to a man who had his way to make in the world. In
+short, he was in the throes of reaction. But now, in her
+unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never know.
+The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of
+deletions--since to do otherwise might be to discourage delators--
+and there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such as
+took place in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de
+Ataud better pleased with the world than he had been since
+morning.
+
+On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a
+servant announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his
+hopes, and thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he
+received from her a letter which made him the most ample amends:
+
+"Rodrigo,--There is a matter on which we must come early to an
+understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and
+sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated,
+since as the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit.
+For myself I care little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo,
+since if in spite of what has happened you would still wish to
+make me your wife, as you declared on Monday, it would be my wish
+to come to you well cowered. Now the inheritance which would be
+confiscated by the Holy Office from the daughter of a heretic
+might not be so confiscated from the wife of a gentleman of
+Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide as your
+heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to me.
+
+"Isabella."
+
+She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
+consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His
+fortune was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it
+seemed, Rodrigo was given the chance to make his own by marrying
+the beautiful Isabella at once, before sentence came to be passed
+upon her father. The Holy Office might impose a fine, but would
+not go further where the inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of
+clean lineage was concerned. He was swayed between admiration of
+her shrewdness and amazement at his own good fortune. Also his
+vanity was immensely flattered.
+
+He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his
+resolve to marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in
+person, as she had bidden him, to carry out the resolve.
+
+She received him in the mansion's best room, a noble chamber
+furnished with a richness such as no other house in Seville could
+have boasted. She had arrayed herself for the interview with an
+almost wanton cunning that should enhance her natural endowments.
+Her high-waisted gown, low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice,
+was of cloth of gold, edged with miniver at skirt and cuffs and
+neck. On her white bosom hung a priceless carcanet of limpid
+diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of her bronze-coloured
+hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never had Don
+Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure and
+glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now
+his olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms,
+kissing her cheek, her lips, her neck.
+
+"My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!" he murmured, rapturously. Then
+added the impatient question: "The priest? Where is the priest
+that shall make us one?"
+
+Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance.
+Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted
+in a smile that maddened him.
+
+"You love me, Rodrigo--in spite of all?"
+
+"Love you!" It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost
+inarticulate ejaculation. "Better than life--better than
+salvation."
+
+She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. "Oh,
+I am glad--so glad--that your love for me is truly strong. I am
+about to put it to the test, perhaps."
+
+He held her very close. "What is this test, beloved?"
+
+"It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
+indissoluble save by death."
+
+"Why, so do I," quoth he, who had so much to gain.
+
+"And, therefore, because after all, though I profess
+Christianity, there is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a
+marriage that must satisfy even my father when he regains his
+freedom, as I believe he will--for, after all, he is not charged
+with any sin against the faith."
+
+She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his
+ardour.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, and his voice was strained.
+
+"I mean--you'll not be angry with me?--I mean that I would have
+us married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian
+manner, but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance
+with the Jewish rites."
+
+Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax
+their grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
+
+"Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me,
+you'll not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I
+am your wife you shall never hear anything again to remind you
+that I am of Jewish blood."
+
+His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and
+beads of sweat stood out upon his brow.
+
+"My God!" he groaned. "What do you ask? I . . . I can't. It were
+a desecration, a defilement."
+
+She thrust him from her in a passion. "You regard it so? You
+protest love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice
+all to you, you will not make this little sacrifice for my sake,
+you even insult the faith that was my forbears', if it is not
+wholly mine. I misjudged you, else I had not bidden you here to-
+day. I think you had better leave me."
+
+Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he
+sought to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her
+own. He ranted torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and
+aloof as earlier she had been warm and clinging. He had proved
+the measure of his love. He could go his ways.
+
+The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a
+desecration, a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of
+ten million maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not
+easily relinquished. There was enough cupidity in his nature,
+enough neediness in his condition, to make the realization of
+that dream worth the defilement of the abominable marriage rites
+upon which she insisted. But fear remained where Christian
+scruples were already half-effaced.
+
+"You do not realize," he cried. "If it were known that I so much
+as contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear
+proof of apostasy, and send me to the fire."
+
+"If that were your only objection it were easily overcome," she
+informed him coldly. "For who should ever inform against you?
+The Rabbi who is waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's
+sake betray us, and who else will ever know?"
+
+"You can be sure of that?"
+
+He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him
+in his turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier
+hesitation had begotten in her, until it was he who pleaded
+insistently for this Jewish marriage that filled him with such
+repugnance.
+
+And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers
+in which the conspirators had met.
+
+"Where is the Rabbi?" he asked impatiently, looking round that
+empty room.
+
+"I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him."
+
+"Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?"
+
+"No," she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. "Yet I
+would not have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to
+this." They were odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He
+was hardly master of the wits which in themselves were never of
+the brightest. "I require you to declare that it is your own
+desire that our marriage should be solemnized in accordance with
+the Jewish rites and the law of Moses."
+
+And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing
+done and ended, made answer hastily:
+
+"Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be
+so married--in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law
+of Moses. And now, where is the Rabbi?" He caught a sound and saw
+a quiver in the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove.
+"Ah! He is here, I suppose...."
+
+He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his
+hands in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside,
+and forth stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt
+man, stooping slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white
+habit and black cloak of the order of St. Dominic, his face lost
+in the shadows  of a black cowl. Behind him stood two lay
+brothers of the order, two armed familiars of the Holy Office,
+displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.
+
+Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those
+terribly damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood
+blankly at gaze a moment, not even seeking to understand how this
+dread thing had come to pass.
+
+The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the
+tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey
+Tomas de Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful
+came the voice of that deeply sincere and saintly man.
+
+"My son, I was told this of you--that you were a Judaizer--yet
+before I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in
+one of your lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses.
+Oh, my poor child, by what wicked counsels have you been led so
+far astray?" The sweet, tender eyes of the inquisitor were
+luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing pity shook his gentle
+voice.
+
+And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this
+exploded. He flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate
+denunciation.
+
+"It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into
+this. It was a trap she baited for my undoing."
+
+"It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith
+which I was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of
+heretical pravity the trap had never caught you; had your faith
+been strong, my son, you could not have been seduced from loyalty
+to your Redeemers"
+
+"Father! Hear me, I implore you!" He flung down upon his knees,
+and held out shaking, supplicating hands.
+
+"You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any
+man unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had
+been told that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved
+that it should be so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you
+opened the gates of your soul to evil. But remembering that age
+and reason will often make good and penitent amends for the
+follies of early life, I hoped and prayed for you. Yet that you
+should Judaize--that you should be bound in wedlock by the
+unclean ties of Judaism--Oh!" The melancholy voice broke off upon
+a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his hands--long,
+white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. "Pray now, my child,
+for grace and strength," he exhorted. "Offer up the little
+temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your
+error, and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you
+shall deserve salvation from that Divine Mercy which is
+boundless. You shall have my prayers, my son. I can do no more.
+Take him hence."
+
+On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the
+first Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-
+conspirators, and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented
+but little of the ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these
+proceedings. But the essentials were already present.
+
+In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green
+Cross of the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom
+walked two by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter
+the Martyr, the familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned,
+candle in hand, barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential
+sack. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the
+streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and a sermon of the
+faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were
+conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the
+stake and faggots awaited them.
+
+Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
+accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra,
+avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by
+falseness the instrument of her father's ruin.
+
+For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a
+convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her
+no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an
+oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give.
+In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the
+doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of
+posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless,
+grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon four
+hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
+legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+
+The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+
+
+
+There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human
+frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the
+Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of
+Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-
+brother to the bowelless King Philip II. of Spain. Never was
+woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more utterly the
+victim of the circumstances of her birth.
+
+Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as
+witness the dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural
+daughters--and especially for one who, like herself, bore a
+double load of cadency--there was little use or hope. Their royal
+blood set them in a class apart; their bastardy denied them the
+worldly advantages of that  spurious eminence. Their royal blood
+prescribed that they must mate with princes; their bastardy
+raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore, since the world
+would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it was expedient to
+withdraw them from the world before its vanities beglamoured
+them, and to immure them in convents, where they might aspire
+with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
+
+Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been
+sent to the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence
+removed thence to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at
+Madrigal, where it was foreordained that she should take the
+veil. She went unwillingly. She had youth, and youth's hunger of
+life, and not even the repressive conditions in which she had
+been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high spirit or in
+concealing from her the fact that she was beautiful. On the
+threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle's will was to
+be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have beheld
+the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
+made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to
+bear witness that she did not go of her own free will.
+
+But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's
+was, under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to
+soften the sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he
+accounted due to one of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty
+accorded her certain privileges unusual to members of religious
+communities: he granted her a little civil list--two ladies-in-
+waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her the title of
+Excellency, which she still retained even when after her hurried
+novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
+where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in
+vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected
+body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go
+to make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which
+one day is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the
+seasons of the year lose their significance; in which time has no
+purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping
+and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying and contemplating,
+until life loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself
+into preparation for death.
+
+Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit
+remained unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might
+encompass her; in time and by slow degrees she might become
+absorbed into the grey spirit of the place. But that time was not
+yet. For the present she must nourish her caged and starving soul
+with memories of glimpses caught in passing of the bright,
+active, stirring world without; and where memory stopped she had
+now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of high
+adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but
+to feed and swell her yearnings.
+
+This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of
+the order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved
+in the great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-
+witness. And above all he loved to talk of that last romantic
+King of Portugal, with whom he had been intimate, that high-
+spirited, headstrong, gallant, fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at
+the age of four-and-twenty had led the disastrous overseas
+expedition against the Infidel, which had been shattered on the
+field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
+
+He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants
+he had seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was
+embarking with crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights
+and men-at-arms, the array of German and Italian mercenaries, the
+young king in his bright armour, bare of head--an incarnation of
+St. Michael--moving forward exultantly amid flowers and
+acclamations to take ship for Africa. And she would listen with
+parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body bending forward in
+her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic. Anon when he
+came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir, her
+dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly
+truthful. He did not say that military incompetence and a
+presumptuous vanity which would listen to no counsels had been
+the cause of a ruin that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal,
+and finally the very kingdom itself. He represented the defeat as
+due to the overwhelming numbers of the Infidel, and dwelt at
+length upon the closing scene, told her in fullest detail how
+Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of those who urged
+him to fly when all was lost, how the young king, who had fought
+with a lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day's
+defeat, had turned and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to
+fight his last fight and find a knightly death. Thereafter he was
+seen no more.
+
+It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more
+and more deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him
+with questions touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin,
+concerning his ways of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when
+he came to the crown of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de
+Souza told her served but to engrave more deeply upon her virgin
+mind the adorable image of the knightly king. Ever present in the
+daily thoughts of this ardent girl, his empanoplied figure
+haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that her waking senses
+would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the memory of
+someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the memory
+of the dream--words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten
+of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind
+not calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She
+was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a
+myth, a mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen
+years. She mourned him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily
+and nightly for the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation
+waited now almost impatiently for death that should unite her
+with him. Taking joy in the thought that she should go to him a
+maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood that had been
+imposed upon her.
+
+One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange
+excitement.
+
+"Is it so certain that he is dead?" she asked. "When all is said,
+none actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body
+surrendered by Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond
+recognition. Is it not possible that he may have survived?"
+
+The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
+impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
+
+"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he
+lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to
+deliver his country from the thrall of Spain."
+
+"Then . . . then . . ."
+
+Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it
+wishes to believe."
+
+"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.
+
+He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on
+his ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in
+the shadow of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed
+over the wide quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and
+burial ground. Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of
+invisible but ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and
+vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their
+black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet
+roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock,
+digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the
+cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
+Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by
+King Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-
+waiting as claustral conditions would permit.
+
+At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
+
+"Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my
+way to preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as
+befitted one who had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned
+by a person of eminence to have a care of what I said of Don
+Sebastian, for not only was he alive, but he would be secretly
+present at the Requiem."
+
+He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted
+lips.
+
+"But that," he added, "was fifteen years ago, and since then I
+have had no sign. At first I thought it possible . . . there was
+a story afloat that might have been true . . . But fifteen
+years!" He sighed, and shook his head.
+
+"What . . . what was the story?" She was trembling from head to
+foot.
+
+"On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the
+gates of the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid
+guard refused to open to them, they announced that one of them
+was King Sebastian, and so won admittance. One of the three was
+wrapped in a cloak, his face concealed, and his two companions
+were observed to show him the deference due to royalty."
+
+"Why, then . . ." she was beginning.
+
+"Ah, but afterwards," he interrupted her, "afterwards, when all
+Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied
+that King Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was
+affirmed to have been no more than a ruse of those men's to gain
+the shelter of the city."
+
+She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to
+draw from him the admission that it was possible denial and
+explanation obeyed the wishes of the hidden prince.
+
+"Yes, it is possible," he admitted at length, "and it is believed
+by many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-
+spirited. The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon
+him that he preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a
+throne of which he now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal
+believes it so, and waits and hopes."
+
+When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the
+clear conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who
+hoped more fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or
+yearned more passionately to acclaim him should he show himself.
+And that was much to think, for the yearning of Portugal was as
+the yearning of the slave for freedom.
+
+Sebastian's mother was King Philip's sister, whereby King Philip
+had claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of
+Portugal. Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that
+foreign rule, and Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply,
+passionately patriotic man, had been foremost among those who had
+sought to liberate her. When Don Antonio, the sometime Prior of
+Crato, Sebastian's natural cousin, and a bold, ambitious,
+enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt, the friar
+had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those days
+Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
+renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
+preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had
+wielded a vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had
+unstintingly exerted on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was
+profoundly devoted. After Don Antonio's army had been defeated on
+land by the Duke of Alba, and his fleet shattered in the Azores
+in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Frey Miguel found himself
+deeply compromised by his active share in the rebellion. He was
+arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In the end,
+because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II., aware of
+the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
+gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la
+Real, where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant
+of the Princess Anne of Austria.
+
+But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
+nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio--
+who, restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad--
+or yet to abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his
+life was ever the independence of Portugal, with a native prince
+upon the throne. And because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that
+grew almost daily into conviction, that Sebastian had survived
+and would return one day to claim his kingdom, those two at
+Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the great stream of life, were
+drawn more closely to each other.
+
+But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered
+and the deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again.
+Gradually she reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all
+hopes were set upon a reunion with the unknown beloved in the
+world to come.
+
+One evening in the spring of 1594--four years after the name of
+Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess--
+Frey Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a
+village whose every inhabitant was known to him, when he came
+suddenly face to face with a stranger. A stranger would in any
+case have drawn his attention, but there was about this man
+something familiar to the friar, something that stirred in him
+vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of shabby black
+was that of a common townsman, but there was something in his air
+and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded
+chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of
+intrepidity and assurance.
+
+Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips
+of the stranger--who, in the fading light, might have been of any
+age from thirty to fifty--a puzzled frown upon the brow of the
+friar. Then the man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"God save your paternity," was his greeting.
+
+"God save you, my son," replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him.
+"I seem to know you. Do I?"
+
+The stranger laughed. "Though all the world forget, your
+paternity should remember me"
+
+And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. "My God!" he
+cried, and set a hand upon the fellow's shoulder, looking deeply
+into those bold, grey eyes. "What make you here?"
+
+"I am a pastry-cook."
+
+"A pastry-cook? You?"
+
+"One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
+Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the
+Convent here, and so for the sake of old times--of happier times--
+I bethought me that I might claim your paternity's support." He
+spoke with a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
+
+"Assuredly . . ." began the priest, and then he checked. "Where
+is your shop?"
+
+"Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?"
+
+Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
+
+For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
+celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he
+went straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the
+early hour, desired to see her Excellency.
+
+"Lady," he told her, "I have great news; news that will rejoice
+your heart." She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in
+his sunken eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones.
+"Don Sebastian lives. I have seen him."
+
+A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she
+paled until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her
+brow; her breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed
+upon her feet, and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady
+and save herself from falling. He saw that he had blundered by
+his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the full depth of her
+feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared that she
+would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly
+delivered.
+
+"What do you say? Oh, what do you say?" she moaned, her eyes
+half-closed.
+
+He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting
+all the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses.
+Gradually she quelled the storm of her emotions.
+
+"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour
+suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became
+radiant. "Where is he?"
+
+"Here. Here in Madrigal."
+
+"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"
+
+"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime
+preacher and counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real.
+He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of
+Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his
+term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to
+disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people."
+
+It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
+turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and
+dreadful fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the
+constant companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent,
+imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming
+passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the
+flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in
+an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to
+bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and
+so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.
+
+Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the
+Holy Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed
+that he had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the
+pride that had brought him down, by roaming the world in humble
+guise, earning his bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat
+of his brow like any common hind, until he should have purged his
+offense and rendered himself worthy once more to resume the
+estate to which he had been born.
+
+It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It
+exalted her hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in
+her fond dreams, particularly when to that general outline were
+added in the days that followed details of the wanderings and
+sufferings of the Hidden Prince. At last, some few weeks after
+that first startling announcement of his presence, in the early
+days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel proposed to her the
+thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
+
+"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all
+these years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply
+touched. He desires your leave to come and prostrate himself at
+your feet."
+
+She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom
+heaved in tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint
+consent.
+
+Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour,
+where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in
+the background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle
+height, dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme
+simplicity, yet without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had
+first discovered him.
+
+His hair was of a light brown--the colour to which the golden
+locks of the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago
+might well have faded--his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes
+were grey. His face was handsome, and save for the colour of his
+eyes and the high arch of his nose presented none of the
+distinguishing and marring features peculiar to the House of
+Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his mother.
+
+Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before
+her.
+
+"I am here to receive your Excellency's commands," he said.
+
+She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
+
+"Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up
+as a pastry-cook?" she asked him.
+
+"To serve your Excellency."
+
+"Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least
+understand is that of a pastry-cook."
+
+The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep
+sigh.
+
+"If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should
+not now be reduced to following this one."
+
+She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between
+them was very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a
+promise to come soon again, and the undertaking on her side to
+procure for his shop the patronage of the convent.
+
+Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass
+celebrated by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel--which was open
+to the public--and afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy
+and accompany him thence to the convent parlour, where the
+Princess waited, usually with one or another of her attendant
+nuns. These daily interviews were brief at first, but gradually
+they lengthened until they came to consume the hours to dinner-
+time, and presently even that did not suffice, and Sebastian must
+come again later in the day.
+
+And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also
+in intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's
+future came to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself.
+His penance had been overlong already for what was really no
+fault at all, since it is the heart rather than the deed that
+Heaven judges, and his heart had been pure, his intention in
+making war upon the Infidel loftily pious. Diffidently he
+admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel were of
+opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
+II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be
+long delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip
+might oppose Sebastian's claims.
+
+Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he
+spent in Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal,
+within and without the convent. She was a nun professed,
+interdicted from seeing any man but her confessor other than
+through the parlour grating, and even then not at such length or
+with such constancy as this. The intimacy between them--fostered
+and furthered by Frey Miguel--had so ripened in a few weeks that
+Anne was justified in looking upon him as her saviour from the
+living tomb to which she had been condemned, in hoping that he
+would restore her to the life and liberty for which she had ever
+yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
+own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been
+against her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she
+was still within the five probationary years prescribed.
+Therefore, in her view, her vows were revocable.
+
+But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or
+knowledge, and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there
+was none bold enough, considering Anne's royal rank, to offer
+remonstrance or advice, particularly too, considering that her
+behaviour had the sanction of Frey Miguel, the convent's
+spiritual adviser. But from without, from the Provincial of
+the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
+respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous
+visits she received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk,
+for which it would be wise to cease to give occasion. That
+recommendation scorched her proud, sensitive soul with shame. She
+sent her servant Roderos at once to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed
+the letter in his hands.
+
+The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
+
+"It was to have been feared," he said, and sighed.
+
+"There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined.
+Don Sebastian must go."
+
+"Go?" Fear robbed her of breath. "Go where?"
+
+"Away from Madrigal--anywhere--and at once; tomorrow at latest."
+And then, seeing the look of horror in her face, "What else, what
+else?" he added, impatiently. "This meddlesome provincial may be
+stirring up trouble already."
+
+She fought down her emotion. "I . . . I shall see him before he
+goes?" she begged.
+
+"I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider." He flung
+away in deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life
+was slipping from her.
+
+That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room,
+hoping against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona
+Maria de Grado brought word that Espinosa was even then in the
+convent in Frey Miguel's cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled
+thence without her seeing him, And careless of the impropriety of
+the hour--it was already eight o'clock and dusk was falling--she
+at once dispatched Roderos to the friar, bidding him bring
+Espinosa to her in the parlour.
+
+The friar obeyed, and the lovers--they were no less by now--came
+face to face in anguish.
+
+"My lord, my lord," she cried, casting all prudence to the winds,
+"what is decided?"
+
+"That I leave in the morning," he answered.
+
+"To go where?" She was distraught.
+
+"Where?" He shrugged. "To Valladolid at first, and then . . .
+where God pleases."
+
+"And when shall I see you again?"
+
+"When . . . when God pleases."
+
+"Oh, I am terrified . . . if I should lose you  . . . if I should
+never see you more!" She was panting, distraught.
+
+"Nay, lady, nay," he answered. "I shall come for you when the
+time is ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at
+the latest, and I shall bring with me one who will avouch me."
+
+"What need any to avouch you to me?" she protested, on a note of
+fierceness. "We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free
+to roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless. . ."
+
+"Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together.
+See." He stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of
+pounce, some quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a
+quill, and wrote with labour, for princes are notoriously poor
+scholars:
+
+"I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to
+wife the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most
+serene Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the disiensation
+which I hold from two pontiffs."
+
+And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in
+all ages--"El Rey"--the King.
+
+"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.
+
+"How shall this scrawl content me?"
+
+"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."
+
+Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey
+Miguel urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot
+her own grief, and became all solicitude for him, until naught
+would content her but she must empty into his hands her little
+store of treasure--a hundred ducats and such jewels as she
+possessed, including a gold watch set with diamonds and a ring
+bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of all a
+portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
+
+At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel
+had gone on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he
+had passionately urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had
+done the same by the Princess both weeping now. At last he was
+gone, and on the arm of Dona Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne
+staggered back to her cell to weep and pray.
+
+In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed
+by her sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last
+she sought to mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither
+he had repaired. Of all those letters only two survive.
+
+"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we
+suffer by absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I
+did not seek the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend
+some moments in communion with you, there would be an end to me.
+What I feel to-day is what I feel every day when I recall the
+happy moments sodeliciously spent, which are no more. This
+privation is for me so severe a punishment of heaven that I
+should call it unjust, for without cause I find myself deprived
+of the happiness missed by me for so many years and purchased at
+the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord, how willingly,
+nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the misfortunes
+that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the least
+of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
+term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
+suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It
+were impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
+
+"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I
+plighted to you I shall keep in life and in death, for death
+itself could not tear it from my soul, and this immortal soul
+will harbour it through eternity. . ."
+
+Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King
+Philip of Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his
+Valladolid retreat. How he filled his days we  do not know,
+beyond the fact that he moved freely abroad. For it was in the
+streets of that town that meddlesome Fate brought him face to
+face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom Espinosa had been
+a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.
+
+Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's
+garments were not in their first freshness they were far from
+being those of a plebeian.
+
+"In whose service may you be now?" quoth the intrigued Gregorio,
+so soon as greetings had passed between them.
+
+Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand
+of his sometime comrade. "Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I
+am not in anybody's service, rather do I require servants
+myself."
+
+"Why, what is your present situation?"
+
+Loftily Espinosa put him off. "No matter for that," he answered,
+with a dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his
+cloak about him to proceed upon his way. "If there is anything
+you wish for I shall be happy, for old times' sake, to oblige
+you."
+
+But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
+readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an
+unsuspected state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio.
+Gregorio's wife would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and
+to hear from his own lips of his improved and prosperous state.
+Gregorio would take no refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding
+to his insistence, went with him to the sordid quarter where
+Gregorio had his dwelling.
+
+About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
+three--Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter
+displayed none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa's
+prosperity which Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed
+her evil envy, and it may have been to nourish it--which is the
+surest way to punish envy--that he made Gregorio a magnificent
+offer of employment.
+
+"Enter my service," said he, "and I will pay you fifty ducats
+down and four ducats a month."
+
+Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince
+them he displayed a gold watch--most rare possession--set with
+diamonds, a ring of price, and other costly jewels. The couple
+stared now with dazzled eyes.
+
+"But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you
+had been a pastry-cook at Ocana?" burst from Gregorio.
+
+Espinosa smiled. "How many kings and princes have been compelled
+to conceal themselves under disguises?" he asked oracularly. And
+seeing them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it
+seems, was sacred to him--not even the portrait of that lovely,
+desolate royal lady in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked
+it, and thrust it to them across the stains of wine and oil that
+befouled their table.
+
+"Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain," he
+bade them. "A prince could not have a lovelier bride."
+
+"But she is dressed as a nun," the woman protested. "How, then,
+can she marry?"
+
+"For kings there are no laws," he told her with finality.
+
+At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer
+he had made him. He would come again for the cook's reply,
+leaving word meanwhile of where he was lodged.
+
+They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the
+woman's disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous
+fear that what he had told them of himself might, after all, be
+true. Upon that malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an
+information with Don Rodrigo de Santillan, the Alcalde of
+Valladolid.
+
+Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find
+his room invaded by alguaziles--the police of the Alcalde. He was
+arrested and dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of
+himself and of certain objects of value found in his possession--
+more particularly of a ring, on the cameo of which was carved a
+portrait of King Philip.
+
+"I am Gabriel de Espinosa," he answered firmly, "a pastry-cook of
+Madrigal."
+
+"Then how come you by these jewels?"
+
+"They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her
+account. That is the business that has brought me to Valladolid."
+
+"Is this Dona Ana's portrait?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you,
+then, pretend that these were also given you to sell?"
+
+"Why else should they be given me?"
+
+Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as
+for the lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for
+that? The Alcalde conned his man more closely, and noted that
+dignity of bearing, that calm assurance which usually is founded
+upon birth and worth. He sent him to wait in prison, what time he
+went to ransack the fellow's house in Madrigal.
+
+Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner
+mysteriously found means to send a warning that enabled Frey
+Miguel to forestall the Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival,
+the friar had abstracted from Espinosa's house a box of papers
+which he reduced to ashes. Unfortunately Espinosa had been
+careless. Four letters not confided to the box were discovered by
+the alguaziles. Two of them were from Anne--one of which supplies
+the extract I have given; the other two from Frey Miguel himself.
+
+Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
+reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile
+was kept on the alert by the persistent plottings of the
+Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He
+was intimate with the past life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-
+sacrificing patriotism and passionate devotion to the cause of
+Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of his prisoner, and
+leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his hands--the man
+whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms by the
+title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
+had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered
+the arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana
+at the convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the
+effect of surprise. He opened the interview by holding up
+before her one of the letters he had found, asking her if she
+acknowledged it for her own.
+
+She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his
+hands, tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he
+caught her wrists in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little
+regard in that moment for the blood royal in her veins. King
+Philip was a stern master, pitiless to blunderers, and Don
+Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he suffer that
+precious letter to be destroyed.
+
+Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments
+and confessed the letter her own.
+
+"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-
+cook, and to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the
+magistrate.
+
+"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
+she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir
+and subsequent penitential wanderings.
+
+Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
+convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King
+Philip. His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once
+dispatched Don Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the
+Holy Office to Madrigal to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne
+should be solitarily confined in her cell, and her nuns-in-
+waiting and servants placed under arrest.
+
+Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the
+prison of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with
+an escort of arquebusiers.
+
+"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
+guards, half-mockingly.
+
+Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos,
+a travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that
+he spoke both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos
+addressed him in Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and
+replied that although he had been in Portugal, he could not speak
+the language.
+
+Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three
+chief prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--
+succeeded one another with a wearisome monotony of results. The
+Apostolic Commissary interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel;
+Don Rodrigo conducted the examinations of Espinosa. But nothing
+was elicited that took the matter forward or tended to dispel its
+mystery.
+
+The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
+tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times
+insulting interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don
+Sebastian, and wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him
+for her honour's sake to proclaim himself what he really was,
+declaring to him that the time had come to cast off all disguise.
+
+Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
+Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and
+the air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie
+that asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don
+Rodrigo had now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under
+exurnination, ever evading the magistrate's practiced point when
+it sought to pin him, and he was no less careful to say nothing
+that should incriminate either of the other two prisoners. He
+denied that he had ever given himself out to be Don Sebastian,
+though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had
+persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.
+
+He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating
+that he had never known either of them--an answer this which
+would have fitted the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after
+his father's death, and quitted in early infancy by his mother.
+
+As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
+that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the
+belief that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He
+protested that he had acted in good faith throughout, and without
+any thought of disloyalty to the King of Spain.
+
+Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison,
+Espinosa was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the
+Alcalde. At once he would have risen and dressed.
+
+"Nay," said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, "that is not necessary
+for what is intended."
+
+It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with
+tousled hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly
+interpreted into a threat of torture. His face grew white.
+
+"It is impossible," he protested. "The King cannot have ordered
+what you suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a
+man of honour. He may require my death, but in an honourable
+manner, and not upon the rack. And as for its being used to make
+me speak, I have nothing to add to what I have said already."
+
+The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim
+smile.
+
+"I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions.
+Sometimes you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and
+sometimes a person of honourable degree. To hear you at this
+moment one might suppose that to submit you to torture would be
+to outrage your dignity. What then . . ."
+
+Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch
+from the hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of
+the prisoner, who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the
+Alcalde had detected. In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that
+the prisoner's hair and beard had turned grey at the roots, and
+so received the last proof that he had to do with the basest of
+impostures. The fellow had been using dyes, the supply of which
+had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo departed
+well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.
+
+Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too
+late, and even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded
+to its natural grey, and he presented the appearance of what in
+fact he was--a man of sixty, or thereabouts.
+
+Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
+him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from
+Frey Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations,
+that the full truth--known to himself alone--was extracted by the
+rack.
+
+He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent
+desire to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never
+abandoned the hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio,
+the Prior of Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had
+devised a plan, primarily inspired by the ardent nature of the
+Princess Anne and her impatience of the conventual life. It was
+while casting about for the chief instrument that he fortuitously
+met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa had been a
+soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain and
+Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had
+befriended Frey Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point
+of being invaded by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril
+of it. Thus they had become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had
+an instance of the man's resource and courage. Further, he was of
+the height of Don Sebastian and of the build to which the king
+might have grown in the years that were sped, and he presented
+other superficial resemblances to the late king. The colour of
+his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be made to
+play the part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was
+waiting so passionately and confidently. There had been other
+impostors aforetime, but they had lacked the endowments of
+Espinosa, and their origins could be traced without difficulty.
+In addition to these natural endowments, Espinosa should be
+avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody in the world was better
+qualified in such a matter--and by the niece of King Philip, to
+whom he would be married when he raised his standard. It was
+arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the
+arrangements were complete, where the Pretender would be
+accredited by the exiled friends of Don Antonio residing there--
+the Prior of Crato being a party to the plot. From France Frey
+Miguel would have worked in Portugal through his agents, and
+presently would have gone there himself to stir up a national
+movement in favour of a pretender so fully accredited. Thus he
+had every hope of restoring Portugal to her independence. Once
+this should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would appear in
+Lisbon, unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of the
+kingdom which had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from
+Spain.
+
+That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a
+singleness of aim and a detachment from minor considerations that
+never hesitated to sacrifice the princess, together with the
+chief instrument of the intrigue. Was the liberation of a
+kingdom, the deliverance of a nation from servitude, the
+happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance against the
+fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a soldier
+of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
+plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in
+Espinosa and the man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to
+dazzle the Gonzales at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to
+the end, which he suffered in October of 1595, a full year after
+his arrest. To the last he avoided admissions that should throw
+light upon his obscure identity and origin.
+
+"If it were known who I am . . ." he would say, and there break
+off.
+
+He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with
+calm fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the
+like dignity, after having undergone degradation from his
+priestly dignity.
+
+As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of
+shame and humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the
+previous July. The Apostolic Commissary notified her of the
+sentence which King Philip had confirmed. She was to be
+transferred to another convent, there to undergo a term of four
+years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to fast on bread and
+water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of ever holding
+any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term as an
+ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency
+to be extinguished, together with all other honours and
+privileges conferred upon her by King Philip.
+
+The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the
+King, her uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable
+Philip of Spain unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the
+hunger of her starved heart, and chafingunder the ascetic life
+imposed upon her, she had allowed herself to be fascinated by the
+prospect of becoming the protectress of one whom she believed to
+be an unfortunate and romantic prince, and of exchanging her
+convent for a throne.
+
+Her punishment--poor soul--endured for close upon forty years,
+but the most terrible part of it was not that which lay within
+the prescription of King Philip, but that which arose from her
+own broken and humiliated spirit. She had been uplifted a moment
+by a glorious hope, to be cast down again into the blackest
+despair, to which a shame unspeakable and a tortured pride were
+added.
+
+Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
+
+
+
+
+
+V. THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+
+The Assassination of Henry IV
+
+
+
+In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV.
+of France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
+
+In their conjunction these two events were to influence the
+destinies of Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough,
+since it was as much a commonplace that an old gentleman should
+die as that Henry of Bearn should fall in love. Love had been the
+main relaxation of his otherwise strenuous life, and neither the
+advancing years--he was fifty-six at this date--nor the
+recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his long-suffering Florentine
+wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
+
+Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King
+Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous,
+his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny
+outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II.
+He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as
+Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by
+comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a
+seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
+adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
+
+This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in
+the affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I
+have said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is
+difficult, without being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a
+girl of twenty. Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear
+to have found him so. On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was
+so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that she came to
+reciprocate the passion she inspired.
+
+Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal
+de Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged,
+the marshal found the match extremely suitable, and was willing
+enough, until the King declared himself. Henry used the most
+impudent frankness.
+
+"Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend," said he. "I am in
+love, and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency.
+If you should marry her I should hate you. If she should love me
+you would hate me. A breach of our friendship would desolate me,
+for I love you with sincere affection."
+
+That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further
+with a marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most
+probably give him to choose between assuming the ridiculous role
+of a complacent husband and being involved in a feud with his
+prince. He said as much, and thanked the King for his frankness,
+whereupon Henry, liking him more than ever for his good sense,
+further opened his mind to him.
+
+"I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall
+have her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is
+coming on. Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a
+hundred thousand livres a year with which to amuse himself."
+
+Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
+Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been
+less acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the
+prospect of a hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor
+was he that for half that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own
+daughter to wife, without stopping to consider the disadvantages
+it might entail.
+
+The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of
+1609. Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last
+precisely what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against
+it, but the Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by
+Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious
+adventurers who had come from Florence in her train, and who saw
+in the King's weakness their own opportunity.
+
+The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the
+relations between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to
+breaking-point. And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own
+making was growing about him until it threatened to overwhelm
+him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his ambassador at
+Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance into
+stark apprehension.
+
+When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving
+all the world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor
+had stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German
+princes had bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke
+Leopold. Now this was an arrangement that did not suit Henry's
+policy at all, and being then--as the result of a wise husbanding
+of resources--the most powerful prince in Europe, Henry was not
+likely to submit tamely to arrangements that did not suit him.
+His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the difference
+between France and the House of Austria arising out of this
+matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
+Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one
+day be united with France; and it was partly to support this
+claim that he was now disposed to attach the German princes to
+his interests.
+
+Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents
+at the court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine
+ambassador, acting upon instructions from certain members of the
+household of the Queen of France, and from others whom Vaucelas
+said he dared not mention, were intriguing to blast Henry's
+designs against the house of Austria, and to bring him willy-
+nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so far in
+their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
+the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a
+marriage between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
+
+That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal,
+where Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien
+de Bethune, Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he
+was his closest friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King
+leaned upon him and sought his guidance not only in State affairs,
+but in the most intimate and domestic matters. Often already had
+it fallen to Sully to patch up the differences created between
+husband and wife by Henry's persistent infidelities.
+
+The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of
+the closet in which the duke--but newly risen--received him in
+bed-gown and night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came
+abruptly to the matter.
+
+"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood
+with his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a
+little above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune
+in jerkin and long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a
+wine-coloured ostrich plume. His countenance matched his raiment.
+Keeneyed, broad of brow, with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red
+lips, a tuft of beard and a pair of grizzled, bristling
+moustachios, he looked half-hero, half-satyr; half-Captain, half-
+Polichinelle.
+
+Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and
+dignity, despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering
+his high, bald crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
+
+"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he,
+and gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me
+with apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than
+from any former attachment of yours."
+
+"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was
+almost sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated.
+It is the work of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no
+respect for me, at least he might consider how he slanders a
+child of such grace and wit and beauty, a lady of her high birth
+and noble lineage."
+
+There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not
+missed by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window,
+and flung into a chair.
+
+"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her
+to take violent resolutions which might give colour to their
+pernicious designs."
+
+"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.
+
+Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked
+forth the letter from Vaucelas.
+
+"Read that."
+
+Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated:
+"They must be mad!"
+
+"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly
+sane, which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What
+do you infer, Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against
+resolutions from which they know that nothing can turn me while
+I have life?"
+
+"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.
+
+"In acting thus--in daring to act thus," the King expounded,
+"they proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to
+live."
+
+"Sire!"
+
+"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am
+dead."
+
+Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied
+silence, his loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery
+the truth that he perceived.
+
+"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take
+your measures."
+
+"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare
+not name? Can you suggest another than . . ." He paused,
+shrinking in horror from completing the utterance of his thought.
+Then, with an abrupt gesture, he went on, ". . . than the Queen
+herself?"
+
+Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He
+took his chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
+
+"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have  exasperated
+her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon
+the councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an
+attachment of yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen,
+but never such trouble as I have been foreseeing from your
+attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you not consider
+where you stand?"
+
+"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the
+uncompromising gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended,
+"they are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend,
+that I am sick with love of her. Day and night I see nothing but
+her gracious image. I sigh and fret and fume like any callow lad
+of twenty. I suffer the tortures of the damned. And yet . . . and
+yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb this passion though
+it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they consume my
+soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm has
+come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the
+inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how
+far he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the
+Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they
+have set up for her in their own apartments. What can you
+conclude from that but that they suggest that I desire to poison
+her?"
+
+"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair
+packing back to Florence, and so be rid of them."
+
+Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I
+have a mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it,
+Sully. Disabuse her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess
+of Conde; make my peace with her; convince her of my sincerity,
+of my firm intention to have done with gallantry, so that she on
+her side will make me the sacrifice of banishing the Concinis.
+You will do this, my friend?"
+
+It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past
+experience, and the task was one in which he was by now well-
+practiced; but the situation had never before been quite so
+difficult. He rose.
+
+"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may
+require something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may
+reopen the question of her coronation so long and--in her view--
+so unreasonably postponed."
+
+Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an
+instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and
+this instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me.
+If she will dare so much, having so little real power, what might
+she not do if . . ." He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she
+demands it we must yield, I suppose," he said at length. "But
+give her to understand that if I discover any more of her designs
+with Spain I shall be provoked to the last degree against her.
+And as an antidote to these machinations at Madrid you may
+publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German Princes
+in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
+arming to that end."
+
+He may have thought--as was long afterwards alleged--that the
+threat itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no
+power in Europe that could have stood against his armies in the
+field.
+
+On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that
+Henry should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
+
+"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and
+respect the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte
+solely so that I might impose silence upon my own passion."
+
+And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have
+relied absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy
+it is for a heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive
+itself"--which is the most amiable conceivable way of saying that
+he attached not the slightest faith to the King's promise.
+
+Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between
+the royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had
+taught him; and he might have driven a good bargain on his
+master's behalf but for his master's own weakness in supporting
+him. Maria de' Medici would not hear of the banishment of the
+Concinis, to whom she was so deeply attached. She insisted with
+perfect justice that she was a bitterly injured woman, and
+refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save with the
+condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
+France--which was no more than her due--should be made at once,
+and that the King should give an undertaking not to make himself
+ridiculous any longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of
+the matters contained in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all
+knowledge, nor would suffer any further inquisition.
+
+From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory.
+But he yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged
+her so much in one way that he must make some compensating
+concessions to her in another. This weakness was part of his
+mental attitude towards her, which swung constantly between
+confidence and diffidence, esteem and indifference, affection and
+coldness; at times he inclined to put her from him entirely; at
+others he opined that no one on his Council was more capable of
+the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation aroused
+by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not to
+admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
+reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
+Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was
+not sincere in the intention.
+
+By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's
+judgment. The court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of
+Henry's prudence was battered down by the vanity of that lovely
+fool, Charlotte, who must be encouraging her royal lover to
+resume his flattering homage. But both appear to have reckoned
+without the lady's husband.
+
+Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of  eighteen
+thousand livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont
+au Change; and you conceive what the charitable ladies of the
+Court had to say about it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur
+de Conde put himself into a fine heat, and said things which
+pained and annoyed the King exceedingly. Henry had amassed a
+considerable and varied experience of jealous husbands in his
+time; but he had never met one quite so intolerable as this
+nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to Sully.
+
+"My friend,--Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
+possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of
+me. I shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile
+I am obliged to taut to him with severity."
+
+More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to
+withhold payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance,
+and to give refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he
+intended also, no doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did
+not receive a pension of a hundred thousand livres a year for
+nothing.
+
+"If this does not keep him in bounds," Henry concluded, "we must
+think of some other method, for he says the most injurious things
+of me."
+
+So little did it keep the prince in bounds--as Henry understood
+the phrase--that he immediately packed his belongings, and
+carried his wife off to his country house. It was quite in vain
+that Henry wrote to him representing that this conduct was
+dishonouring to them both, and that the only place for a prince
+of the blood was the court of his sovereign.
+
+The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took
+to night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the
+disguise of a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre,
+whose will was law in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges,
+ankle-deep in wet grass, spending long hours in love-lore,
+ecstatic contemplation of her lighted window, and all--so far as
+we can gather--for no other result than the aggravation of
+certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him that he
+was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.
+
+But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded.
+Henry had been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he
+strayed from the path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw
+to that. And when they judged the season ripe, they put her
+Majesty in possession of the facts. So inflamed was she by this
+fresh breach of trust that war was declared anew between the
+royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours could now
+accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
+
+And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde
+took the desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife,
+without troubling--as was his duty--to obtain the King's consent.
+On the last night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the
+Louvre, the Chevalier du Guet brought him the news of the
+prince's flight.
+
+"I never in my life," says Bassompierre, who was present, "saw a
+man so distracted or in so violent a passion."
+
+He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing
+over behind him. "I am undone!" was his cry. "Undone! This madman
+has carried off his wife--perhaps to kill her." White and
+shaking, he turned to Bassompierre. "Take care of my money," he
+bade him, "and go on with the game."
+
+He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the
+Arsenal to fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came
+at once, but in an extremely bad temper, for it was late at
+night, and he was overburdened with work.
+
+He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and
+forward, his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind
+him. The Queen, a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart,
+attended by a few of her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her
+train. Her countenance was set and inscrutable, and her brooding
+eyes were fixed upon the King.
+
+"Ha, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and
+strained. "What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"
+
+"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was
+excited.
+
+"Nothing! What sort of advice is that?"
+
+"The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be
+talked of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of
+any consequence to you, or capable of giving you the least
+uneasiness."
+
+The Queen cleared her throat huskily. "Good advice, Monsieur le
+Duc," she approved him. "He will be wise to follow it." Her voice
+strained, almost threatening. "But in this matter I doubt wisdom
+and he have long since become strangers."
+
+That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
+maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and
+with a patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in
+pursuit of the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the
+road to Landrecy, which was enough for him. Stage by stage he
+followed them in that flight to Flanders, picking up the trail as
+he went, and never pausing until he had reached the frontier
+without overtaking them.
+
+It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it,
+shed tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned
+letters in which she addressed him as her knight, and implored
+him, as he loved her, to come and deliver her from the detestable
+tyrant who held her in thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed
+his undoing, drove him mad, and blinded him to everything--even
+to the fact that his wife, too, was shedding tears, and that
+these were of rage undiluted by any more tender emotion.
+
+He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the
+Prince of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke
+declined with dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law
+of nations, Henry dispatched Cccuvres secretly to Brussels to
+carry off thence the princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the
+alert, anti frustrated the design by sending a warning of what
+was intended to the Marquis Spinola, as a result of which the
+Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for greater security in
+the Archduke's own palace.
+
+Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which
+he continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses,
+Henry took the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade
+the Low Countries as the first step in the execution of that
+design of a war with Spain which hitherto had been little more
+than a presence. The matter of the Duchy of Cleves was a pretext
+ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he desired he would set
+Europe in a blaze.
+
+He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the
+new year, and in the months that followed France rang with
+preparations. It rang, too, with other things which should have
+given him pause. It rang with the voice of preachers giving
+expression to the popular vied; that Cleves was not worth
+fighting for, that the war was unrighteous--a war undertaken by
+Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against the very
+champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring,
+tool with prophecies of the King's approaching end.
+
+These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin,
+and the astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the
+stars that May would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome--
+from the very pope himself Came notice of a conspiracy against
+him in which he was told that the very highest in the land
+were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne, and Douai came messages of
+like purport, and early in May a note was found one morning on
+the altar of the church of Montargis announcing the King's
+approaching death.
+
+But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his
+preparations undeterred by either warnings or prognostications.
+There had been so many conspiracies against his life already that
+he was become careless and indifferent in such matters. Yet
+surely there never had been one that was so abundantly heralded
+from every quarter, or ever one that was hatched under conditions
+so propitious as those which he had himself created now. In his
+soul he was not at ease, and the source of his uneasiness was the
+coronation of the Queen, for which the preparations were now
+going forward.
+
+He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him
+from any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose
+influence with the Queen was almost such as to give them a
+control over her--the Concinis and their unavowed but obvious
+ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were dead, and the Queen so left
+that she could be made absolute regent during the Dauphin's
+minority, it was those adventurers who would become through her
+the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and gratify
+to the full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that his
+safety lay in opposing this coronation--already fixed for the
+13th May--which Maria de' Medici was so insistent should take
+place before his departure for the wars. The matter so preyed
+upon his mind that last he unburdened himself to Sully one day at
+the Arsenal.
+
+"Oh, my friend," he cried, "this coronation does not please me.
+My heart tells me that some fatality will follow."
+
+He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully
+could only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained
+awhile in deep thought. Then he started up again.
+
+"Pardieu!" he cried. "I shall be murdered in this city. It is
+their only resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation
+will be the cause of my death."
+
+"What a thought, sir!"
+
+"You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed
+to the prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master." And
+wrinkles deepened about the bold, piercing eyes. "It is four
+months and more since we announced our intention of going to war,
+and France has resounded with our preparations. We have made no
+secret of it. Yet in Spain not a finger has been lifted in
+preparation to resist us, not a sword has been sharpened. Upon
+what does Spain build? Whence her confidence that in despite of
+my firm resolve and my abundant preparations, despite the fact
+announced that I am to march on the lath of this month, despite
+the fact that my troops are already in Champagne with a train of
+artillery so complete and well-furnished that France has never
+seen the like of it, and perhaps never will again--whence the
+confidence that despite all this there is no need to prepare
+defences? Upon what do they build, I say, when they assume, as
+assume they must, that there will be no war? Resolve me that,
+Grand Master."
+
+But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
+
+"You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain
+builds on my death. And who are the friends of Spain here in
+France? Who was it intrigued with Spain in such a way and to
+such ends as in my lifetime could never have been carried to an
+issue? Ha! You see."
+
+"I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!" cried
+that loyal, honest gentleman. "And yet if you are convinced of
+it, you should break off this coronation, your journey, and your
+war. If you wish it so, it is not difficult to satisfy you."
+
+"Ay, that is it." He came to his feet, and gripped the duke's
+shoulder in his strong, nervous hand. "Break off this coronation,
+and never let me hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can
+rid my mind of apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to
+fear."
+
+"Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis,
+to stop the preparations and dismiss the workmen."
+
+"Ah, wait." The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new
+hope, grew dull again; the lines of care descended between the
+brows. "Oh, what to decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my
+friend. But how will my wife take it?"
+
+"Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will
+continue obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of
+disaster."
+
+"Perhaps not, perhaps not," he answered. But his tone was not
+sanguine. "Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I
+cannot do this thing. But you will know how to persuade her. Go
+to her."
+
+Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought
+the Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties,
+and arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was
+labour lost. Maria de' Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's
+arguments she opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
+
+Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute
+right, she would be a person of no account and subject to the
+Council of Regency during the King's absence, a position unworthy
+and intolerable to her, the mother of the Dauphin.
+
+And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the
+wrongs that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was
+doing her by this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged.
+He had chanced one day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought
+of this war.
+
+"Those who have the best information," the Nuncio answered
+boldly, "are of opinion that the principal object of the war is
+the Princess of Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to
+France."
+
+Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an
+impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
+
+"Yes, by God!" he cried. "Yes--most certainly I want to have her
+back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even
+God's viceregent on earth."
+
+Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to
+the Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than
+anything that had yet happened in this affair, his conscience
+left him, despite his fears, powerless now to thwart her even to
+the extent of removing those pernicious familiars of hers of
+whose plottings he had all but positive evidence.
+
+And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
+magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been
+concerted that the festivities should last four days and conclude
+on the Sunday with the Queen's public entry into Paris. On the
+Monday the King was to set out to take command of his armies,
+which were already marching upon the frontiers.
+
+Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen--convinced by his own
+admission of the real aim and object of the war, and driven by
+outraged pride to hate the man who offered her this crowning
+insult, and determined that at all costs it must be thwarted--had
+lent an ear to Concini's purpose to avenge her, and was ready to
+repay infidelity with infidelity. Concini and his fellow-
+conspirators had gone to work so confidently that a week before
+the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege, announcing that
+he was going with news of Henry's assassination to the Princes of
+Germany, whilst at the same time accounts of the King's death
+were being published in France and Italy.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
+outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his
+wife's coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony
+by the title of "Madam Regent."
+
+The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience.
+For that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and
+when he sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him
+of a dream in which she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring
+him with a tenderness such as had been utterly foreign to her of
+late to take great care of himself in the days to come. In the
+morning she renewed those entreaties, beseeching him not to leave
+the Louvre that day, urging that she had a premonition it would
+be fatal to him.
+
+He laughed for answer. "You have heard of the predictions of La
+Brosse," said he. "Bah! You should not attach credit to such
+nonsense."
+
+Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
+Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to
+receive a like answer.
+
+Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night's broken
+rest, Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him,
+he rose, pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out
+into the courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he
+casually asked the time, observing the King's pallor and
+listlessness, took the liberty of suggesting that his Majesty
+might benefit if he took the air.
+
+That chance remark decided Henry's fate. His eyes quickened
+responsively. "You advise well," said he. "Order my coach. I will
+go to the Arsenal to see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed."
+
+On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await
+their masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in
+a dingy, clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that
+he had once been arrested on no better grounds than because it
+was deemed impossible that a man with such a face could be other
+than a villain.
+
+Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the
+Louvre, and startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With
+fearful insistence she besought him to countermand the order, and
+not to leave the palace.
+
+"I will but go there and back," he said, laughing at her fears.
+"I shall have returned before you realize that I have gone." And
+so he went, never to return alive.
+
+He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all
+the curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations
+of the city against the Queen's public entry on Sunday. The Duc
+d'Epernon was on his right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis
+de la Force on his left. Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the
+right boot, whilst near the left boot, opposite to Henry, sat
+Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He was attended only by a
+small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some footmen.
+
+The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de
+la Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block
+occasioned by the meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the
+other with wine. The footmen went ahead with the exception of
+two. Of these, one advanced to clear a way for the royal vehicle,
+whilst the other took the opportunity to fasten his garter.
+
+At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the
+shops, came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on
+the stones outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by
+deliberately standing upon one of the spokes of the stationary
+wheel, he leaned over the Duc d'Epernon, and, whipping a long,
+stout knife from his sleeve, stabbed Henry in the breast. The
+King, who was in the act of reading a letter, cried out, and
+threw up his arms in an instinctive warding movement, thereby
+exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and this time the
+blade went deep.
+
+With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood
+gushed from his mouth.
+
+The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier
+riding through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the
+stories of his death already at that very hour circulating in
+Antwerp, Malines, Brussels, and elsewhere.
+
+The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried
+by Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and
+stood there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself
+of the incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King's
+gentlemen-in-waiting, who had followed the coach, whipped out his
+sword and would have slain him on the spot had he not been
+restrained by Epernon. The footmen seized the fellow, and
+delivered him over to the captain of the guard. He proved to be a
+school-master of Angouleme--which was Epernon's country. His name
+was Ravaillac.
+
+The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about,
+and driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it
+was announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
+
+But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife
+that had stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to
+Henry's loyal and devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge
+exactly whence the blow had proceeded. With anger and grief in
+his heart he got to horse, ill as he was, and, calling together
+his people, set out presently for the Louvre, with a train one
+hundred strong, which was presently increased to twice that
+number by many of the King's faithful servants who joined his
+company as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in
+passing slipped a note into his hand.
+
+It was a brief scrawl: "Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done.
+I have seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape
+any more than he did."
+
+Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a
+gentleman named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
+
+"Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself,
+for this strange blow will have fearful consequences."
+
+Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose
+contents were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings
+mounting swiftly to certainty, Sully rode amain towards the
+Louvre, his train by now amounting to some three hundred horse.
+But at the end of the street he was stopped by M. de Vitry, who
+drew rein as they met.
+
+"Ah, monsieur," Vitry greeted him, "where are you going with such
+a following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with
+more than two or three attendants, which I would not advise you
+to do. For this plot does not end here. I have seen some persons
+so little sensible of the loss they have sustained that they
+cannot even simulate the grief they should feel. Go back,
+monsieur. There is enough for you to do without going to the
+Louvre."
+
+Persuaded by Vitry's solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart,
+Sully faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently
+he was overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to
+come at once to her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as
+possible with him. "This proposal," he writes, "to go alone and
+deliver myself into the hands of my enemies, who filled the
+Louvre, was not calculated to allay my suspicions."
+
+Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the
+guards and a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the
+Arsenal, that others had been sent to the Temple, where the
+powder was stored, and others again to the treasurer of the
+Exchequer to stop all the money there.
+
+"Convey to the Queen my duty and service," he bade the messenger,
+"and assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I
+shall continue assiduously to attend the affairs of my office."
+And with that he went to shut himself up in the Bastille, whither
+he was presently followed by a stream of her Majesty's envoys,
+all bidding him to the Louvre. But Sully, ill as he was, and now
+utterly prostrated by all that he had endured, put himself to bed
+and made of his indisposition a sufficient excuse.
+
+Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her
+summons, receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for
+any apprehensions. Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain
+security in the esteem in which the Parisians held him. An
+attempt against him in the Louvre itself would prove that the
+blow that had killed his master was not the independent act of a
+fanatic, as it was being represented; and vengeance would follow
+swiftly upon the heads of those who would thus betray themselves
+of having made of that poor wretch's fanaticism an instrument to
+their evil ends.
+
+In that assurance he went, and he has left on record the burning
+indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction,
+complacency, and even mirth that he discovered in that house of
+death. The Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and
+perhaps conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh
+hour she had sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully,
+and brought in the Dauphin, who flung himself upon the Duke's
+neck.
+
+"My son," the Queen addressed him, "this is Monsieur de Sully.
+You must love him well, for he was one of the best and most
+faithful servants of the King your father, and I entreat him to
+continue to serve you in the same manner."
+
+Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his
+suspicions were unworthy. But, even then, the sequel would very
+quickly have undeceived him. For very soon thereafter his fall
+was brought about by the Concinis and their creatures, so that no
+obstacle should remain between themselves and the full gratification
+of their fell ambitions.
+
+At once he saw the whole policy of the dead King subversed; he
+saw the renouncing of all ancient alliances, and the union of the
+crowns of France and Spain; the repealing of all acts of
+pacification; the destruction of the Protestants; the dissipation
+of the treasures amassed by Henry; the disgrace of those who
+would not receive the yoke of the new favourites. All this Sully
+witnessed in his declining years, and he witnessed, too, the
+rapid rise to the greatest power and dignity in the State of that
+Florentine adventurer, Concino Concini--now bearing the title of
+Marshal d'Ancre--who had so cunningly known how to profit by a
+Queen's jealousy and a King's indiscretions.
+
+As for the miserable Ravaillac, it is pretended that he
+maintained under torture and to the very hour of his death that
+he had no accomplices, that what he had done he had done to
+prevent an unrighteous war against Catholicism and the Pope--
+which was, no doubt, the falsehood with which those who used him
+played upon his fanaticism and whetted him to their service. I
+say "pretended" because, after all, complete records of his
+examinations are not discoverable, and there is a story that when
+at the point of death, seeing himself abandoned by those in whom
+perhaps he had trusted, he signified a desire to confess, and did
+so confess; but the notary Voisin, who took his depositions in
+articulo mortis, set them down in a hand so slovenly as to be
+afterwards undecipherable.
+
+That may or may not be true. But the statement that when the
+President du Harlay sought to pursue inquiries into certain
+allegations by a woman named d'Escoman, which incriminated the
+Duc d'Epernon, he received a royal order to desist, rests upon
+sound authority.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+That is the story of the assassination of Henry IV. re-told in
+the light of certain records which appear to me to have been
+insufficiently studied. They should suggest a train of speculation
+leading to inferences which, whilst obvious, I hesitate to define
+absolutely.
+
+"If it be asked," says Perefixe, "who were the friends that
+suggested to Ravaillac so damnable a design, history replies that
+it is ignorant and that upon an action of Such consequences it is
+not permissible to give suspicions and conjectures for certain
+truths. The judges themselves who interrogated him dared not open
+their mouths, and never mentioned the matter but with gestures of
+horror and amazement."
+
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+
+The Murder of Amy Robsart
+
+
+
+There had been a banquet, followed by a masque, and this again by
+a dance in which the young queen had paired off with Lord Robert
+Dudley, who in repute was the handsomest man in Europe, just as
+in fact he was the vainest, shallowest, and most unscrupulous.
+There had been homage and flattery lavishly expressed, and there
+was a hint of masked hostility from certain quarters to spice the
+adventure, and to thrill her bold young spirit. Never yet in all
+the months of her reign since her coronation in January of last
+year had she felt so much a queen, and so conscious of the power
+of her high estate; never so much a woman, and so conscious of
+the weakness of her sex. The interaction of those conflicting
+senses wrought upon her like a heady wine. She leaned more
+heavily upon the silken arm of her handsome Master of the Horse,
+and careless in her intoxication of what might be thought or
+said, she--who by the intimate favour shown him had already
+loosed the tongue of Scandal and set it chattering in every court
+in Europe--drew him forth from that thronged and glittering
+chamber of the Palace of Whitehall into the outer solitude and
+friendly gloom.
+
+And he, nothing loth to obey the suasion of that white hand upon
+his arm, exultant, indeed, to parade before them all the power he
+had with her, went willingly enough. Let Norfolk and Sussex
+scowl, let Arundel bite his lip until it bled, and sober Cecil
+stare cold disapproval. They should mend their countenances soon,
+and weigh their words or be for ever silenced, when he was master
+in England. And that he would soon be master he was assured to-
+night by every glance of her blue eyes, by the pressure of that
+fair hand upon his arm, by the languishing abandonment with which
+that warm young body swayed towards him, as they passed out from
+the blaze of lights and the strains of music into the gloom and
+silence of the gallery leading to the terrace.
+
+"Out--let us go out, Robin. Let me have air," she almost panted,
+as she drew him on.
+
+Assuredly he would be master soon. Indeed, he might have been
+master already but for that wife of his, that stumbling-block to
+his ambition, who practiced the housewifely virtues at Cumnor
+Place, and clung so tenaciously and so inconsiderately to life in
+spite of all his plans to relieve her of the burden of it.
+
+For a year and more his name had been coupled with the Queen's in
+a tale that hurt her honour as a woman and imperilled her dignity
+as a sovereign. Already in October of 1559 Alvarez de Quadra, the
+Spanish ambassador, had written home: "I have learnt certain
+things as to the terms on which the Queen and Lord Robert stand
+towards each other which I could not have believed."
+
+That was at a time when de Quadra was one of a dozen ambassadors
+who were competing for her hand, and Lord Robert had, himself,
+appeared to be an ally of de Quadra and an advocate of the
+Spanish marriage with the Archduke Charles. But it was a presence
+which nowise deceived the astute Spaniard, who employed a legion
+of spies to keep him well informed.
+
+"All the dallying with us," he wrote, "all the dallying with the
+Swede, all the dallying there will be with the rest, one after
+another, is merely to keep Lord Robert's enemies in play until
+his villainy about his wife can be executed."
+
+What that particular villainy was, the ambassador had already
+stated earlier in his letter. "I have learnt from a person who
+usually gives me true information that Lor d Robert has sent to
+have his wife poisoned."
+
+What had actually happened was that Sir Richard Verney--a trusted
+retainer of Lord Robert's--had reported to Dr. Bayley, of New
+College, Oxford, that Lady Robert Dudley was "sad and ailing,"
+and had asked him for a potion. But the doctor was learned in
+more matters than physic. He had caught an echo of the tale of
+Lord Robert's ambition; he had heard a whisper that whatever
+suitors might come from overseas for Elizabeth, she would marry
+none but "my lord"--as Lord Robert was now commonly styled. More,
+he had aforetime heard rumours of the indispositions of Lady
+Robert, yet had never found those rumours verified by the fact.
+Some months ago, it had been reported that her ladyship was
+suffering from cancer of the breast and likely soon to die of it.
+Yet Dr. Bayley had reason to know that a healthier woman did not
+live in Berkshire.
+
+The good doctor was a capable deductive reasoner, and the
+conclusion to which he came was that if they poisoned her under
+cover of his potion--she standing in no need of physic--he might
+afterwards be hanged as a cover for their crime. So he refused to
+prescribe as he was invited, nor troubled to make a secret of
+invitation and refusal.
+
+For awhile, then, Lord Robert had prudently held his hand;
+moreover, the urgency there had been a year ago, when that host
+of foreign suitors laid siege to Elizabeth of England, had
+passed, and his lordship could afford to wait. But now of a
+sudden the urgency was returned. Under the pressure brought to
+bear upon her to choose a husband, Elizabeth had half-committed
+herself to marry the Archduke Charles, promising the Spanish
+ambassador a definite answer within a few days.
+
+Lord Robert had felt the earth to be quaking under him; he had
+seen the ruin of his high ambitions; he had watched with rage the
+expanding mockery upon the countenances of Norfolk, Sussex, and
+those others who hated and despised him; and he had cursed that
+wife of his who knew not when to die. But for that obstinacy with
+which she clung to life he had been the Queen's husband these
+many months, so making an end to suspense and to the danger that
+lies in delay.
+
+To-night the wantonness with which the Queen flaunted before the
+eyes of all her court the predilection in which she held him,
+came not merely to lull his recent doubts and fears, to feed his
+egregious vanity, and to assure him that in her heart he need
+fear no rival; it came also to set his soul Quiver impotent rage.
+He had but to put forth his hands to possess himself of this
+splendid prize. Yet those hands of his were bound while that
+woman lived at Cumnor. Conceive his feelings as they stole away
+together like any pair of lovers.
+
+Arm in arm they came by a stone gallery, where a stalwart scarlet
+sentinel, a yeoman of the guard, with a Tudor rose embroidered in
+gold upon his back, stood under a lamp set in the wall, with
+grounded pike and body stiffly erect.
+
+The tall young Queen was in crimson satin with cunningly-wrought
+silver embroideries, trimmed with tufted silver fringe, her
+stomacher stiff with silver bullion studded with gold rosettes
+and Roman pearls, her bodice cut low to display her splendid
+neck, decked by a carcanet of pearls and rubies, and surmounted
+by a fan-like cuff of guipure, high behind and sloping towards
+the bust. Thus she appeared to the sentinel as the rays of the
+single lamp behind him struck fire from her red-gold hair. As if
+by her very gait to express the wantonness of her mood, she
+pointed her toes and walked with head thrown back, smiling up
+into the gipsy face of her companion, who was arrayed from head
+to foot in shimmering ivory satin, with an elegance no man in
+England could have matched.
+
+They came by that stone gallery to a little terrace above the
+Privy Steps. A crescent moon hung low over the Lambeth marshes
+across the river. From a barge that floated gay with lights in
+mid-stream came a tinkle of lutes, and the sweet voice of a
+singing boy. A moment the lovers stood at gaze, entranced by the
+beauty of the soft, tepid September night, so subtly adapted to
+their mood. Then she fetched a sigh, and hung more heavily upon
+his arm, leaned nearer to his tall, vigorous, graceful figure.
+
+"Robin, Robin!" was all she said, but in her voice throbbed a
+world of passionate longing, an exquisite blend of delight and
+pain.
+
+Judging the season ripe, his arm flashed round her, and drew her
+fiercely close. For a moment she was content to yield, her head
+against his stalwart shoulder, a very woman nestling to the mate
+of her choice, surrendering to her master. Then the queen in her
+awoke and strangled nature. Roughly she disengaged herself from
+his arm, and stood away, her breathing quickened.
+
+
+"God's Death, Robin!" There was a harsh note in the voice that
+lately had cooed so softly. "You are strangely free, I think."
+
+But he, impudence incarnate, nothing abashed, accustomed to her
+gusty moods, to her alternations between the two natures she had
+inherited--from overbearing father and wanton mother--was
+determined at all costs to take the fullest advantage of the
+hour, to make an end of suspense.
+
+"I am not free, but enslaved--by love and worship of you. Would
+you deny me; Would you?"
+
+"Not I, but fate," she answered heavily, and he knew that the
+woman at Cumnor was in her mind.
+
+"Fate will soon mend the wrong that fate has done--very soon
+now." He took her hand, and, melted again from her dignity, she
+let it lie in his. "When that is done, sweet, then will I claim
+you for my own."
+
+"When that is done, Robin?" she questioned almost fearfully, as
+if a sudden dread suspicion broke upon her mind. "When what is
+done?"
+
+He paused a moment to choose his words, what time she stared
+intently into the face that gleamed white in the surrounding
+gloom.
+
+"When that poor ailing spirit is at rest." And he added: "It will
+be soon."
+
+"Thou hast said the same aforetime, Robin. Yet it has not so
+fallen out."
+
+"She has clung to life beyond what could have been believed of
+her condition," he explained, unconscious of any sinister
+ambiguity. "But the end, I know, is very near--a matter but of
+days."
+
+"Of days!" she shivered, and moved forward to the edge of the
+terrace, he keeping step beside her. Then she stood awhile in
+silence, looking down at the dark oily surge of water. "You loved
+her once, Robin?" she asked, in a queer, unnatural voice.
+
+"I never loved but once," answered that perfect courtier.
+
+"Yet you married her--men say it was a love marriage. It was a
+marriage, anyway, and you can speak so calmly of her death?" Her
+tone was brooding. She sought understanding that should silence
+her own lingering doubt of him.
+
+"Where lies the blame? Who made me what I am?" Again his bold arm
+encompassed her. Side by side they peered down through the gloom
+at the rushing waters, and he seized an image from them. "Our
+love is like that seething tide," he said. "To resist it is to
+labour in agony awhile, and then to perish."
+
+"And to yield is to be swept away."
+
+"To happiness," he cried, and reverted to his earlier prayer.
+"Say that when . . . that afterwards, I may claim you for my own.
+Be true to yourself, obey the voice of instinct, and so win to
+happiness."
+
+She looked up at him, seeking to scan the handsome face in that
+dim light that baffled her, and he observed the tumultuous heave
+of her white breast.
+
+"Can I trust thee, Robin? Can I trust thee? Answer me true!" she
+implored him, adorably weak, entirely woman now.
+
+"What does your own heart answer you?" quoth he, loaning close
+above her.
+
+"I think I can, Robin. And, anyway, I must. I cannot help myself.
+I am but a woman, after all," she murmured, and sighed. "Be it as
+thou wilt. Come to me again when thou art free."
+
+He bent lower, murmuring incoherently, and she put up a hand to
+pat his swarthy bearded cheek.
+
+"I shall make thee greater than any man in England, so thou make
+me happier than any woman."
+
+He caught the hand in his and kissed it passionately, his soul
+singing a triumph song within him. Norfolk and Sussex and those
+other scowling ones should soon be whistled to the master's heel.
+
+As they turned arm in arm into the gallery to retrace their
+steps, they came suddenly face to face with a slim, sleek
+gentleman, who bowed profoundly, a smile upon h is crafty,
+shaven, priestly face. In a smooth voice and an accent markedly
+foreign, he explained that he, too, sought the cool of the
+terrace, not thinking to intrude; and upon that, bowing again, he
+passed on and effaced himself. It was Alvarez de Quadra, Bishop
+of Aquila, the argus-eyed ambassador of Spain.
+
+The young face of the Queen hardened.
+
+"I would I were as well served abroad as the King of Spain is
+here," she said aloud, that the retreating ambassador might hear
+the dubious compliment; and for my lord's ear alone she added
+under her breath: "The spy! Philip of Spain will hear of this."
+
+"So that he hears something more, what shall it signify?" quoth
+my lord, and laughed.
+
+They paced the length of the gallery in silence, past the yeoman
+of the guard, who kept his watch, and into the first antechamber.
+Perhaps it was that meeting with de Quadra and my lord's answer
+to her comment that prompted what now she asked: "What is it ails
+her, Robin?"
+
+"A wasting sickness," he answered, never doubting to whom the
+question alluded.
+
+"You said, I think, that . . . that the end is very near."
+
+He caught her meaning instantly. "Indeed, if she is not dead
+already, she is very nearly so."
+
+He lied, for never had Amy Dudley been in better health. And yet
+he spoke the truth, for in so much as her life depended upon his
+will, it was as good as spent. This was, he knew, a decisive
+moment of his career. The hour was big with fate. If now he were
+weak or hesitant, the chance might slip away and be for ever lost
+to him. Elizabeth's moods were as uncertain as were certain the
+hostile activities of my lord's enemies. He must strike quickly
+whilst she was in her present frame of mind, and bring her to
+wedlock, be it in public or in private. But first he must shake
+off the paralysing encumbrance of that house-wife down at Cumnor.
+
+I believe--from evidence that I account abundant--that he
+considered it with the cold remorselessness of the monstrous
+egotist he was. An upstart, great-grandson to a carpenter, noble
+only in two descents, and in both of them stained by the block,
+he found a queen--the victim of a physical passion that took no
+account of the worthlessness underlying his splendid exterior--
+reaching out a hand to raise him to a throne. Being what he was,
+he weighed his young wife's life at naught in the evil scales of
+his ambition. And yet he had loved her once, more truly perhaps
+than he could now pretend to love the Queen.
+
+It was some ten years since, as a lad of eighteen, he had taken
+Sir John Robsart's nineteen-year-old daughter to wife. She had
+brought him considerable wealth and still more devotion. Because
+of this devotion she was content to spend her days at Cumnor,
+whilst he ruffled it at court; content to take such crumbs of
+attention as he could spare her upon occasion. And during the
+past year, whilst he had been plotting her death, she had been
+diligently caring for his interests and fostering the prosperity
+of the Berkshire estate. If he thought of this at all, he allowed
+no weakly sentiment to turn him from his purpose. There was too
+much at stake for that--a throne, no less.
+
+And so, on the morning after that half-surrender of Elizabeth's,
+we find my lord closeted with his henchman, Sir Richard Verney.
+Sir Richard--like his master--was a greedy, unscrupulous,
+ambitious scoundrel, prepared to go to any lengths for the sake
+of such worldly advancement as it lay in my lord's power to give
+him. My lord perforce used perfect frankness with this perfect
+servant.
+
+"Thou'lt rise or fall with me, Dick," quoth he. "Help me up,
+then, and so mount with me. When I am King, as soon now I shall
+be, look to me. Now to the thing that is to do. Thou'lt have
+guessed it."
+
+To Sir Richard it was an easy guess, considering how much already
+he had been about this business. He signified as much.
+
+My lord shifted in his elbow-chair, and drew his embroidered
+bedgown of yellow satin closer about his shapely limbs.
+
+"Hast failed me twice before, Richard," said he. "God's death,
+man, fail me not again, or the last chance may go the way of the
+others. There's a magic in the number three. See that I profit by
+it, or I am undone, and thou with me."
+
+"I'd not have failed before, but for that suspicious dotard
+Bayley," grumbled Verney. "Your lordship bade me see that all was
+covered."
+
+"Aye, aye. And I bid thee so again. On thy life, leave no
+footprints by which we may be tracked. Bayley is not the only
+physician in Oxford. About it, then, and swiftly. Time is the
+very soul of fortune in this business, with the Spaniard
+straining at the leash, and Cecil and the rest pleading his case
+with her. Succeed, and thy fortune's made; fail, and trouble not
+to seek me again."
+
+Sir Richard bowed, and took his leave. As he reached the door,
+his lordship stayed him. "If thou bungle, do not look to me. The
+court goes to Windsor to-morrow. Bring me word there within the
+week." He rose, magnificently tall and stately, in his bedgown of
+embroidered yellow satin, his handsome head thrown back, and went
+after his retainer. "Thou'lt not fail me, Dick," said he, a hand
+upon the lesser scoundrel's shoulder. "There is much at issue for
+me, and for thee with me."
+
+"I will not fail you, my lord," Sir Richard rashly promised, and
+on that they parted.
+
+Sir Richard did not mean to fail. He knew the importance of
+succeeding, and he appreciated the urgency of the business as
+much as did my lord himself. But between his cold, remorseless
+will to succeed and success itself there lay a gulf which it
+needed all his resource to bridge. He paid a short visit to Lady
+Robert at Cumnor, and professed deepest concern to find in her a
+pallor and an ailing air which no one else had yet observed. He
+expressed himself on the subject to Mrs. Buttelar and the other
+members of her ladyship's household, reproaching them with their
+lack of care of their mistress. Mrs. Buttelar became indignant
+under his reproaches.
+
+"Nay, now, Sir Richard, do you wonder that my lady is sad and
+downcast with such tales as are going of my lord's doings at
+court, and of what there is 'twixt the Queen and him? Her
+ladyship may be too proud to complain, but she suffers the more
+for that, poor lamb. There was talk of a divorce awhile ago that
+got to her ears."
+
+"Old wives' tales," snorted Sir Richard.
+
+"Likely," agreed Mrs. Buttelar. "Yet when my lord neither comes
+to Cumnor, nor requires her ladyship to go to him, what is she to
+think, poor soul?"
+
+Sir Richard made light of all, and went off to Oxford to find a
+physician more accommodating than Dr. Bayley. But Dr. Bayley had
+talked too much, and it was in vain that Sir Richard pleaded with
+each of the two physicians he sought that her ladyship was
+ailing--"sad and heavy"--and that he must have a potion for her.
+
+Each in turn shook his head. They had no medicine for sorrow, was
+their discreet answer. From his description of her condition,
+said each, it was plain that her ladyship's sickness was of the
+mind, and, considering the tales that were afloat, neither was
+surprised.
+
+Sir Richard went back to his Oxford lodging with the feeling of a
+man checkmated. For two whole days of that precious time he lay
+there considering what to do. He thought of going to seek a
+physician in Abingdon. But fearing no better success in that
+quarter, fearing, indeed, that in view of the rumours abroad he
+would merely be multiplying what my lord called "footprints," he
+decided to take some other way to his master's ends. He was a
+resourceful, inventive scoundrel, and soon he had devised a plan.
+
+On Friday he wrote from Oxford to Lady Robert, stating that he
+had a communication for her on the subject of his lordship as
+secret as it was urgent. That he desired to come to her at Cumnor
+again, but dared not do so openly. He would come if she would
+contrive that her servants should be absent, and he exhorted her
+to let no one of them know that he was coming, else he might be
+ruined, out of his desire to serve her.
+
+That letter he dispatched by the hand of his servant Nunweek,
+desiring him to bring an answer. It was a communication that had
+upon her ladyship's troubled mind precisely the effect that the
+rascal conceived. There was about Sir Richard's personality
+nothing that could suggest the villain. He was a smiling, blue-
+eyed, florid gentleman, of a kindly manner that led folk to trust
+him. And on the occasion of his late visit to Cumnor he had
+displayed such tender solicitude that her ladyship--starved of
+affection as she was--had been deeply touched.
+
+His letter so cunningly couched filled her with vague alarm and
+with anxiety. She had heard so many and such afflicting rumours,
+and had received in my lord's cruel neglect of her such
+circumstantial confirmation of them, that she fastened avidly
+upon what she deemed the chance of learning at last the truth.
+Sir Richard Verney had my lord's confidence, and was much about
+the court in his attendance upon my lord. He would know the
+truth, and what could this letter mean but that he was disposed
+to tell it.
+
+So she sent him back a line in answer, bidding him come on Sunday
+afternoon. She would contrive to be alone in the house, so that
+he need not fear being seen by any.
+
+As she promised, so she performed, and on the Sunday packed off
+her household to the fair that was being held at Abingdon that
+day, using insistence with the reluctant, and particularly with
+one of her women, a Mrs. Oddingsell, who expressed herself
+strongly against leaving her ladyship alone in that lonely house.
+At length, however, the last of them was got off, and my lady was
+left impatiently to await her secret visitor. It was late
+afternoon when he arrived, accompanied by Nunweek, whom he left
+to hold the horses under the chestnuts in the avenue. Himself he
+reached the house across the garden, where the blighting hand of
+autumn was already at work.
+
+Within the porch he found her waiting, fretted by her impatience.
+
+"It is very good in you to have come, Sir Richard," was her
+gracious greeting.
+
+"I am your ladyship's devoted servant," was his sufficient
+answer, and he doffed his plumed bonnet, and bowed 1ow before
+her. "We shall be private in your bower above stairs," he added.
+
+"Why, we are private anywhere. I am all alone, as you desired."
+
+"That is very wise--most wise," said he. "Will your ladyship lead
+the way?"
+
+So they went up that steep, spiral staircase, which had loomed so
+prominently in the plans the ingenious scoundrel had evolved.
+Across the gallery on the first floor they entered a little room
+whose windows overlooked the garden. This was her bower--an
+intimate cosy room, reflecting on every hand the gentle,
+industrious personality of the owner. On an oak table near the
+window were spread some papers and account-books concerned with
+the estate--with which she had sought to beguile the time of
+waiting. She led the way towards this, and, sinking into the
+high-backed chair that stood before it, she looked up at him
+expectantly. She was pale, there were dark stains under her eyes,
+and wistful lines had crept into the sweet face of that neglected
+wife.
+
+Contemplating his poor victim now, Sir Richard may have compared
+her with the woman by whom my lord desired so impatiently to
+supplant her. She was tall and beautifully shaped, despite an
+almost maidenly slenderness. Her countenance was gentle and
+adorable, with its soft grey eyes and light brown hair, and
+tender, wistful mouth.
+
+It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently
+desired her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of
+her. Then he obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed
+the remorseless spur of ambition. In reality, then as now, his
+beacon-light was love of self.
+
+Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious
+impatience to hear the news of her lord which he had promised
+her, Sir Richard may have felt some pang of pity. But, like my
+lord, he was of those whose love of self suffers the rivalry of
+no weak emotion.
+
+"Your news, Sir Richard," she besought him, her dove-like glance
+upon his florid face--less florid now than was its wont.
+
+He leaned against the table, his back to the window. "Why, it is
+briefly this," said he. "My lord . . ." And then he checked, and
+fell into a listening attitude.
+
+"What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?"
+
+"No. What is it?" Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting
+under so much mystery.
+
+"Sh! Stay you here," he enjoined. "If we are spied upon . . ." He
+left the sentence there. Already he was moving quickly,
+stealthily, towards the door. He paused before opening it. "Stay
+where you are, my lady," he enjoined again, so gravely that she
+could have no thought of disobeying him. "I will return at once."
+
+He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There
+he stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of
+whipcord, attached at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle
+sharpness. That bodkin he drove into the edge of one of the
+panels of the wainscot, in line with the topmost step; drawing
+the cord taut at a height of a foot or so above this step, he
+made fast its other end to the newel-post at the stair-head. He
+had so rehearsed the thing in his mind that the performance of it
+occupied but a few seconds. Such dim light of that autumn
+afternoon as reached the spot would leave that fine cord
+invisible.
+
+Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his
+absence, so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to
+resolve upon disobeying his injunction.
+
+"We move in secret like conspirators," said he, "and so we are
+easily affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my
+lord himself . . . here?"
+
+"My lord!" she interrupted, coming excitedly to her feet. "Lord
+Robert?"
+
+"To be sure, my lady. It was he had need to visit you in secret--
+for did the Queen have knowledge of his coming here, it would
+mean the Tower for him. You cannot think what, out of love for
+you, his lordship suffers. The Queen . . I,
+
+"But do you say that he is here, man", her voice shrilled up in
+excitement.
+
+"He is below, my lady. Such is his peril that he dared not set
+foot in Cumnor until he was certain beyond doubt that you are
+here alone."
+
+"He is below!" she cried, and a flush dyed her pale cheeks, a
+light of gladness quickened her sad eyes. Already she had
+gathered from his cunning words a new and comforting explanation
+of the things reported to her. "He is below!" she repeated. "Oh!"
+She turned from him, and in an instant was speeding towards the
+door.
+
+He stood rooted there, his nether lip between his teeth, his face
+a ghastly white, whilst she ran on.
+
+"My lord! Robin! Robin!" he heard her calling, as she crossed the
+corridor. Then came a piercing scream that echoed through the
+silent house; a pause; a crashing thud below; and--silence.
+
+Sir Richard remained by the table, immovable. Blood was trickling
+down his chin. He had sunk his teeth through his lip when that
+scream rang out. A long moment thus, as if entranced, awe-
+stricken. Then he braced himself, and went forward, reeling at
+first like a drunken man. But by the time he had reached the
+stairs he was master of himself again. Swiftly, for all his
+trembling fingers, he unfastened the cord's end from the newel-
+post. The wrench upon it had already pulled the bodkin from the
+wainscot. He went down that abrupt spiral staircase at a moderate
+pace, mechanically coiling the length of whip-cord, and bestowing
+it with the bodkin in his pouch again, and all the while his eyes
+were fixed upon the grey bundle that lay so still at the stairs'
+foot.
+
+He came to it at last, and, pausing, looked more closely. He was
+thankful that there was not the need to touch it. The position of
+the brown-haired head was such as to leave no doubt of the
+complete success of his design. Her neck was broken. Lord Robert
+Dudley was free to marry the Queen.
+
+Deliberately Sir Richard stepped over the huddled body of that
+poor victim of a knave's ambition, crossed the hall, and passed
+out, closing the door. An excellent day's work, thought he, most
+excellently accomplished. The servants, returning from Abingdon
+Fair on that Sunday evening, would find her there. They would
+publish the fact that in their absence her ladyship had fallen
+downstairs and broken her neck, and that was the end of the
+matter.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+But that was not the end at all. Fate, the ironic interloper, had
+taken a hand in this evil game.
+
+The court had moved a few days earlier to Windsor, and thither on
+the Friday--the 6th of September--came Alvarez de Quadra to seek
+the definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the
+subject of the Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at
+Whitehall, coupled with his mistrust of her promises and
+experience of her fickleness, had rendered him uneasy. Either she
+was trifling with him, or else she was behaving in a manner
+utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke. In either
+case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must know where he
+stood. Having failed to obtain an audience before the court left
+London, he had followed it to Windsor, cursing all women and
+contemplating the advantages of the Salic law.
+
+He found at Windsor an atmosphere of constraint, and it was not
+until the morrow that he obtained an audience with the Queen.
+Even then this was due to chance rather than to design on the
+part of Elizabeth. For they met on the terrace as she was
+returning from hunting. She dismissed those about her, including
+the stalwart Robert Dudley, and, alone with de Quadra, invited
+him to speak.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am writing to my master, and I desire to
+know whether your Majesty would wish me to add anything to what
+you have announced already as your intention regarding the
+Archduke."
+
+She knit her brows. The wily Spaniard fenced so closely that
+there was no alternative but to come to grips.
+
+"Why, sir," she answered dryly, "you may tell his Majesty that I
+have come to an absolute decision, which is that I will not marry
+the Archduke."
+
+The colour mounted to the Spaniard's sallow cheeks. Iron self-
+control alone saved him from uttering unpardonable words. Even so
+he spoke sternly:
+
+"This, madame, is not what you had led me to believe when last we
+talked upon the subject."
+
+At another time Elizabeth might have turned upon him and rent him
+for that speech. But it happened that she was in high good-humour
+that afternoon, and disposed to indulgence. She laughed,
+surveying herself in the small steel mirror that dangled from her
+waist.
+
+"You are ungallant to remind me, my lord," said she. "My sex, you
+may have heard, is privileged to change of mind."
+
+"Then, madame, I pray that you may change it yet again." His tone
+was bitter.
+
+"Your prayer will not be heard. This time I am resolved."
+
+De Quadra bowed. "The King, my master, will not be pleased, I
+fear."
+
+She looked him straightly in the face, her dark eyes kindling.
+
+"God's death!" said she, "I marry to please myself, and not the
+King your master."
+
+"You are resolved on marriage then?" flashed he.
+
+"And it please you," she mocked him archly, her mood of
+joyousness already conquering her momentary indignation.
+
+"What pleases you must please me also, madame," he answered, in a
+tone so cold that it belied his words. "That it please you, is
+reason enough why you should marry . . . Whom did your Majesty
+say?"
+
+"Nay. I named no names. Yet one so astute might hazard a shrewd
+guess." Half-challenging, half-coy, she eyed him over her fan.
+
+"A guess? Nay, madame. I might affront your Majesty."
+
+"How so?"
+
+"If I were deluded by appearances. If I named a subject who
+signally enjoys your royal favour."
+
+"You mean Lord Robert Dudley." She paled a little, and her
+bosom's heave was quickened. "Why should the guess affront me?"
+
+"Because a queen--a wise queen, madame--does not mate with a
+subject--particularly with one who has a wife already."
+
+He had stung her. He had wounded at once the pride of the woman
+and the dignity of the queen, yet in a way that made it difficult
+for her to take direct offense. She bit her lip and mastered her
+surge of anger. Then she laughed, a thought sneeringly.
+
+"Why, as to my Lord Robert's wife, it seems you are less well-
+informed than usual, sir. Lady Robert Dudley is dead, or very
+nearly so."
+
+And as blank amazement overspread his face, she passed upon her
+way and left him.
+
+But anon, considering, she grew vaguely uneasy, and that very
+night expressed her afflicting doubt to my lord, reporting to him
+de Quadra's words. His lordship, who was mentally near-sighted,
+laughed.
+
+"He'll change his tone before long," said he.
+
+She set her hands upon his shoulders, and looked up adoringly
+into his handsome gipsy face. Never had he known her so fond as
+in these last days since her surrender to him that night upon the
+terrace at Whitehall, never had she been more the woman and less
+the queen in her bearing towards him.
+
+"You are sure, Robin? You are quite sure?" she pleaded.
+
+He drew her close, she yielding herself to his embrace. "With so
+much at stake could I be less than sure, sweet?" said he, and so
+convinced her--the more easily since he afforded her the
+conviction she desired.
+
+That was on the night of Saturday, and early on Monday came the
+news which justified him of his assurances. It was brought him to
+Windsor by one of Amy's Cumnor servants, a fellow named Bowes,
+who, with the others, had been away at Abingdon Fair yesterday
+afternoon, and had returned to find his mistress dead at the
+stairs' foot--the result of an accident, as all believed.
+
+It was not quite the news that my lord had been expecting. It
+staggered him a little that an accident so very opportune should
+have come to resolve his difficulties, obviating the need for
+recourse to those more dangerous measures with which he had
+charged Sir Richard Verney. He perceived how suspicion might now
+fall upon himself, how his enemies would direct it, and on the
+instant made provision. There and then he seized a pen, and wrote
+to his kinsman, Sir Thomas Blount, who even then was on his way
+to Cumnor. He stated in the letter what he had learnt from Bowes,
+bade Blount engage the coroner to make the strictest investigation,
+and send for Amy's natural brother, Appleyard. "Have no respect
+to any living person," was the final injunction of that letter
+which he sent Blount by the hand of Bowes.
+
+And, then, before he could carry to the Queen the news of this
+accident which had broken his matrimonial shackles, Sir Richard
+Verney arrived with the true account. He had expected praise and
+thanks from his master. Instead, he met first dismay, and then
+anger and fierce reproaches.
+
+"My lord, this is unjust," the faithful retainer protested.
+"Knowing the urgency, I took the only way--contrived the
+accident."
+
+"Pray God," said Dudley, "that the jury find it to have been an
+accident; for if the truth should come to be discovered, I leave
+you to the consequences. I warned you of that before you engaged
+in this. Look for no help from me."
+
+"I look for none," said Sir Richard, stung to hot contempt by the
+meanness and cowardice so characteristic of the miserable egotist
+he served. "Nor will there be the need, for I have left no
+footprints.
+
+"I hope that may be so, for I tell you, man, that I have ordered
+a strict inquiry, bidding them have no respect to any living
+person, and to that I shall adhere."
+
+"And if, in spite of that, I am not hanged?" quoth Sir Richard, a
+sneer upon his white face.
+
+"Come to me again when the affair is closed, and we will talk of
+it."
+
+Sir Richard went out, rage and disgust in his heart, leaving my
+lord with rage and fear in his.
+
+Grown calmer now, my lord dressed himself with care and sought
+the Queen to tell her of the accident that had removed the
+obstacle to their marriage. And that same night her Majesty
+coldly informed de Quadra that Lady Robert Dudley had fallen down
+a flight of stairs and broken her neck.
+
+The Spaniard received the information with a countenance that was
+inscrutable.
+
+"Your Majesty's gift of prophecy is not so widely known as it
+deserves to be," was his cryptic comment.
+
+She stared at him blankly a moment. Then a sudden uneasy memory
+awakened by his words, she drew him forward to a window embrasure
+apart from those who had stood about her, and for greater
+security addressed him, as he tells us, in Italian.
+
+"I do not think I understand you, sir. Will you be plain with
+me?" She stood erect and stiff, and frowned upon him after the
+manner of her bullying father. But de Quadra held the trumps, and
+was not easily intimidated.
+
+"About the prophecy?" said he. "Why, did not your Majesty
+foretell the poor lady's death a full day before it came to pass?
+Did you not say that she was already dead, or nearly so?"
+
+He saw her blench; saw fear stare from those dark eyes that could
+be so very bold. Then her ever-ready anger followed swiftly.
+
+"'Sblood, man! What do you imply?" she cried, and went on without
+waiting for his answer. "The poor woman was sick and ill, and
+must soon have succumbed; it will no doubt be found that the
+accident which anticipated nature was due to her condition."
+
+Gently he shook his head, relishing her discomfiture, taking
+satisfaction in torturing her who had flouted him and his master,
+in punishing her whom he had every reason to believe guilty.
+
+"Your Majesty, I fear, has been ill-informed on that score. The
+poor lady was in excellent health--and like to have lived for
+many years--at least, so I gather from Sir William Cecil, whose
+information is usually exact."
+
+She clutched his arm. "You told him what I had said?"
+
+"It was indiscreet, perhaps. Yet, how was I to know . . . ?" He
+left his sentence there. "I but expressed my chagrin at your
+decision on the score of the Archduke--hardly a wise decision, if
+I may be so bold," he added slyly.
+
+She caught the suggestion of a bargain, and became instantly
+suspicious,
+
+"You transcend the duties of your office, my lord," she rebuked
+him, and turned away.
+
+But soon that night she was closeted with Dudley, and closely
+questioning him about the affair. My lord was mightily vehement.
+
+"I take Heaven to be my witness," quoth he, when she all but
+taxed him with having procured his lady's death, "that I am
+innocent of any part in it. My injunctions to Blount, who has
+gone to Cumnor, are that the matter be sifted without respect to
+any person, and if it can be shown that this is other than the
+accident I deem it, the murderer shall hang."
+
+She flung her arms about his neck, and laid her head on his
+shoulder. "Oh, Robin, Robin, I am full of fears," she wailed, and
+was nearer to tears than he had ever seen her.
+
+But, anon, as the days passed their fears diminished, and finally
+the jury at Cumnor--delayed in their finding, and spurred by my
+lord to exhaustive inquiries--returned a verdict of "found dead,"
+which in all the circumstances left his lordship--who was known,
+moreover, to have been at Windsor when his lady died--fully
+acquitted. Both he and the Queen took courage from that finding,
+and made no secret of it now that they would very soon be wed.
+
+But there were many whom that finding did not convince, who read
+my lord too well, and would never suffer him to reap the fruits
+of his evil deed. Prominent among these were Arundel--who himself
+had aimed at the Queen's hand--Norfolk and Pembroke, and behind
+them was a great mass of the people. Indignation against Lord
+Robert was blazing out, fanned by such screaming preachers as
+Lever, who, from the London pulpits, denounced the projected
+marriage, hinting darkly at the truth of Amy Dudley's death.
+
+What was hinted at home was openly expressed abroad, and in Paris
+Mary Stuart ventured a cruel witticism that Elizabeth was to
+conserve in her memory: "The Queen of England," she said, "is
+about to marry her horse-keeper, who has killed his wife to make
+a place for her."
+
+Yet Elizabeth persisted in her intent to marry Dudley, until the
+sober Cecil conveyed to her towards the end of that month of
+September some notion of the rebellion that was smouldering.
+
+She flared out at him, of course. But he stood his ground.
+
+"There is," he reminded her, "this unfortunate matter of a
+prophecy, as the Bishop of Aquila persists in calling it."
+
+"God's Body! Is the rogue blabbing?"
+
+"What else did your Majesty expect from a man smarting under a
+sense of injury? He has published it broadcast that on the day
+before Lady Robert broke her neck, you told him that she was dead
+or nearly so. And he argues from it a guilty foreknowledge on
+your Majesty's part of what was planned."
+
+"A guilty foreknowledge!" She almost choked in rage, and then
+fell to swearing as furiously in that moment as old King Harry at
+his worst.
+
+"Madame!" he cried, shaken by her vehemence. "I but report the
+phrase he uses. It is not mine."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"I do not, madame. If I did I should not be here at present."
+
+"Does any subject of mine believe it?"
+
+"They suspend their judgment. They wait to learn the truth from
+the sequel."
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"That if your motive prove to be such as de Quadra and others
+allege, they will be in danger of believing."
+
+"Be plain, man, in God's name. What exactly is alleged?"
+
+He obeyed her very fully.
+
+"That my lord contrived the killing of his wife so that he might
+have liberty to marry your Majesty, and that your Majesty was
+privy to the deed." He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before
+she could let loose her wrath. "It is still in your power,
+madame, to save your honour, which is now in peril. But there is
+only one way in which you can accomplish it. If you put from you
+all thought of marrying Lord Robert, England will believe that de
+Quadra and those others lied. If you persist and carry out your
+intention, you proclaim the truth of his report; and you see what
+must inevitably follow."
+
+She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
+
+Within a few hours of that interview she delivered her answer to
+Cecil, which was that she had no intention of marrying Dudley.
+
+Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing her
+heart, by renouncing marriage with the only man she could have
+taken for her mate of all who had wooed her. Yet the wound of
+that renunciation was slow to heal. She trifled with the notion
+of other marriages, but ever and anon, in her despair, perhaps,
+we see her turning longing eyes towards the handsome Lord Robert,
+later made Earl of Leicester. Once, indeed, some six years after
+Amy's death, there was again some talk of her marrying him, which
+was quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how Amy
+died. Between these two, between the fulfilment of her desire and
+his ambition, stood the irreconcilable ghost of his poor murdered
+wife.
+
+Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression in her
+passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's
+child: "The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but
+a barren stock."
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+
+The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+
+
+
+Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred
+voyage to El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural,
+seeing that Sir Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but
+also Sir Walter's very good friend and kinsman.
+
+If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality as kinsman or
+as Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him, the cordiality of the
+latter's embrace and the noble entertainment following at the
+house of Sir Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis
+conducted him, set this doubt at rest and relighted the lamp of
+hope in the despairing soul of our adventurer. In Sir Lewis he
+saw only his kinsman--his very good friend and kinsman, to insist
+upon Stukeley's own description of himself--at a time when of all
+others in his crowded life he needed the support of a kinsman and
+the guidance of a friend.
+
+You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the
+brightest ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might
+have added lustre to that of King James, had not his Sowship--to
+employ the title bestowed upon that prince by his own queen--been
+too mean of soul to appreciate the man's great worth. Courtier,
+philosopher, soldier, man of letters and man of action alike,
+Ralegh was at once the greatest prose-writer, and one of the
+greatest captains of his age, the last survivor of that glorious
+company--whose other members were Drake and Frobisher and
+Hawkins--that had given England supremacy upon the seas, that had
+broken the power and lowered the pride of Spain.
+
+His was a name that had resounded, to the honour and glory of
+England, throughout the world, a name that, like Drake's, was a
+thing of hate and terror to King Philip and his Spaniards; yet
+the King of Scots, unclean of body and of mind, who had succeeded
+to the throne of Elizabeth, must affect ignorance of that great
+name which shall never die while England lives.
+
+When the splendid courtier stood before him--for at fifty Sir
+Walter was still handsome of person and magnificent of Apparel--
+James looked him over and inquired who he might be. When they had
+told him:
+
+"I've rawly heard of thee," quoth the royal punster, who sought
+by such atrocities of speech to be acclaimed a wit.
+
+It was ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see
+this great and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge
+of high treason, bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal,
+peddling lawyers, and, finally, although his wit and sincerity
+had shattered every fragment of evidence brought against him,
+sentenced to death. Thus far James went; but he hesitated to go
+further, hesitated to carry out the sentence. Sir Walter had too
+many friends in England then; the memory of his glorious deeds
+was still too fresh in the public mind, and execution might have
+been attended by serious consequences for King James. Besides,
+one at least of the main objects was achieved. Sir Walter's broad
+acres were confiscate by virtue of that sentence, and King James
+wanted the land--filched thus from one who was England's pride--
+to bestow it upon one of those golden calves of his who were
+England's shame.
+
+"I maun hae the land for Carr. I maun hae it," was his brazen and
+peevish answer to an appeal against the confiscation.
+
+For thirteen years Sir Walter lay in the Tower, under that
+sentence of death passed in 1603, enjoying after a season a
+certain liberty, visited there by his dear lady and his friends,
+among whom was Henry, Prince of Wales, who did not hesitate to
+publish that no man but his father--whom he detested--would keep
+such a bird in a cage. He beguiled the time in literary and
+scientific pursuits, distilling his essences and writing that
+stupendous work of his, "The History of the World." Thus old age
+crept upon him; but far from quenching the fires of enterprise
+within his adventurer's soul, it brought a restlessness that
+urged him at last to make a bid for liberty. Despairing of
+winning it from the clemency of James, he applied his wits to
+extracting it from the King's cupidity.
+
+Throughout his life, since the day when first he had brought
+himself to the notice of a Queen by making of his cloak a carpet
+for her feet, he had retained side by side with the dignity of
+the sage and the greatness of the hero, the craft and opportunism
+of the adventurer. His opportunity now was the straitened
+condition of the royal treasury, a hint of which had been let
+fall by Winwood the Secretary of State. He announced at once that
+he knew of a gold mine in Guiana, the El Dorado of the Spaniards.
+
+On his return from a voyage to Guiana in 1595, he had written of
+it thus:
+
+"There the common soldier shall fight for gold instead of pence,
+pay himself with plates half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his
+bones in other wars for provant and penury Those commanders and
+chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find here
+more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden
+images, more sepulchres filled with treasure than either Cortez
+found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru."
+
+Winwood now reminded him that as a consequence many expeditions
+had gone out, but failed to discover any of these things.
+
+"That," said Ralegh, "is because those adventurers were ignorant
+alike of the country and of the art of conciliating its
+inhabitants. Were I permitted to go, I would make Guiana to
+England what Peru has been to Spain."
+
+That statement, reported to James in his need, was enough to fire
+his cupidity, and when Ralegh had further added that he would
+guarantee to the Crown one-fifth of the treasure without asking
+any contribution towards the adventure either in money or in
+ships, he was permitted to come forth and prepare for the
+expedition.
+
+
+His friends came to his assistance, and in March of 1617 he set
+sail for E1 Dorado with a well-manned and wellequipped fleet of
+fourteen ships, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke standing
+sureties for his return.
+
+From the outset the fates were unpropitious. Disaster closed the
+adventure. Gondomar, the Ambassador of Spain at Whitehall, too
+well-informed of what was afoot, had warned his master. Spanish
+ships waited to frustrate Sir Walter, who was under pledge to
+avoid all conflict with the forces of King Philip. But conflict
+there was, and bloodshed in plenty, about the city of Manoa,
+which the Spaniards held as the key to the country into which the
+English adventurers sought to penetrate. Among the slain were the
+Governor of Manoa, who was Gondomar's own brother, and Sir
+Walter's eldest son.
+
+To Ralegh, waiting at the mouth of the Orinoco, came his beaten
+forces in retreat, with the terrible news of a happening that
+meant his ruin. Half-maddened, his anguish increased by the loss
+of his boy, he upbraided them so fiercely that Keymis, who had
+been in charge of the expedition, shut himself up in his cabin
+and shot himself with a pocket-pistol. Mutiny followed, and
+Whitney--most trusted of Sir Walter's captains--set sail for
+England, being followed by six other ships of that fleet, which
+meanwhile had been reduced to twelve. With the remaining five the
+stricken Sir Walter had followed more at leisure. What need to
+hurry? Disgrace, and perhaps death, awaited him in England. He
+knew the power of Spain with James, who was so set upon a Spanish
+marriage for his heir, knew Spain's hatred of himself, and what
+eloquence it would gather in the mouth of Gondomar, intent upon
+avenging his brother's death.
+
+He feared the worst, and so was glad upon landing to have by him
+a kinsman upon whom he could lean for counsel and guidance in
+this the darkest hour of all his life. Sitting late that night in
+the library of Sir Christopher Hare's house, Sir Walter told his
+cousin in detail the story of his misadventure, and confessed to
+his misgivings.
+
+"My brains are broken," was his cry.
+
+Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to
+offer.
+
+"It was not expected," said he, "that you would return.
+
+"Not expected?" Sir Walter's bowed white head was suddenly flung
+back. Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed.
+"What act in all my life justified the belief I should be false
+to honour? My danger here was made quite plain, and Captain King
+would have had me steer a course for France, where I had found a
+welcome and a harbour. But to consent I must have been false to
+my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who were sureties to the King
+for my return. Life is still sweet to me, despite my three-score
+years and more, but honour is sweeter still."
+
+And then, because life was sweet, he bluntly asked his cousin:
+"What is the King's intent by me?"
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley, "who shall know what passes in the
+King's mind? From the signs, I judge your case to be none so
+desperate. You have good friends in plenty, among whom, although
+the poorest, count myself the first. Anon, when you are rested,
+we'll to London by easy stages, baiting at the houses of your
+friends, and enlisting their good offices on your behalf."
+
+Ralegh took counsel on the matter with Captain King, a bluff,
+tawny-bearded seaman, who was devoted to him body and soul.
+
+"Sir Lewis proposes it, eh?" quoth the hardy seaman. "And Sir
+Lewis is Vice-Admiral of Devon? He is not by chance bidden to
+escort you to London?"
+
+The Captain, clearly, had escaped the spell of Stukeley's
+affability. Sir Walter was indignant. He had never held his
+kinsman in great esteem, and had never been on the best of terms
+with him in the past. Nevertheless, he was very far from
+suspecting him of what King implied. To convince him that he did
+Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt question to his
+kinsman in King's presence.
+
+"Nay," said Sir Lewis, "I am not yet bidden to escort you. But as
+Vice-Admiral of Devon I may at any moment be so bidden. It were
+wiser, I hold, not to await such an order. Though even if it
+come," he made haste to add, "you may still count upon my
+friendship. I am your kinsman first, and Vice-Admiral after."
+
+With a smile that irradiated his handsome, virile countenance,
+Sir Walter held out his hand to clasp his cousin's in token of
+appreciation. Captain King expressed no opinion save what might
+be conveyed in a grunt and a shrug.
+
+Guided now unreservedly by his cousin's counsel, Sir Walter set
+out with him upon that journey to London. Captain King went with
+them, as well as Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a
+Frenchman named Manourie, who had made his first appearance in
+the Plymouth household on the previous day. Stukeley explained
+the fellow as a gifted man of medicine, whom he had sent for to
+cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment by which he was
+afflicted.
+
+Journeying by slow stages, as Sir Lewis had directed, they came
+at last to Brentford. Sir Walter, had he followed his own bent,
+would have journeyed more slowly still, for in a measure, as he
+neared London, apprehensions of what might await him there grew
+ever darker. He spoke of them to King, and the blunt Captain said
+nothing to dispel them.
+
+"You are being led like a sheep to the shambles," he declared,
+"and you go like a sheep. You should have landed in France, where
+you have friends. Even now it is not too late. A ship could be
+procured . . ."
+
+"And my honour could be sunk at sea," Sir Walter harshly
+concluded, in reproof of such counsel.
+
+But at the inn at Brentford he was sought out by a visitor, who
+brought him the like advice in rather different terms. This was
+De Chesne, the secretary of the French envoy, Le Clerc. Cordially
+welcomed by Ralegh, the Frenchman expressed his deep concern to
+see Sir Walter under arrest.
+
+"You conclude too hastily," laughed Sir Walter.
+
+"Monsieur, I do not conclude. I speak of what I am inform'."
+
+"Misinformed, sir. I am not a prisoner--at least, not yet," he
+added, with a sigh. "I travel of my own free will to London with
+my good friend and kinsman Stukeley to lay the account of my
+voyage before the King."
+
+"Of your own free will? You travel of your own frets will? And
+you are not a prisoner? Ha !" There was bitter mockery in De
+Chesne's short laugh. "C'est bien drole!" And he explained:
+"Milord the Duke o Buckingham, he has write in his master's name
+to the ambassador Gondomar that you are taken and held at the
+disposal of the King of Spain. Gondomar is to inform him whether
+King Philip wish that you be sent to Spain to essay the justice
+of his Catholic Majesty, or that you suffer here. Meanwhile your
+quarters are being made ready in the Tower. Yet you tell me you
+are not prisoner! You go of your own free will to London. Sir
+Walter, do not be deceive'. If you reach London, you are lost."
+
+Now here was news to shatter Sir Walter's last illusion. Yet
+desperately he clung to the fragments of it. The envoy's secretary
+must be at fault.
+
+"'Tis yourself are at fault, Sir Walter, in that you trust those
+about you," the Frenchman insisted.
+
+Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. "D'ye mean Stukeley?" quoth
+he, half-indignant already at the mere suggestion.
+
+"Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman." De Chesne shrugged. "You should
+know your family better than I. But who is this Manourie who
+accompanies you? Where is he come from? What you know of him?"
+
+Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing.
+
+"But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation. A spy who
+does not scruple to sell his own people. And I know that letters
+of commission from the Privy Council for your arrest were give'
+to him in London ten days ago. Whether those letters were to
+himself, or he was just the messenger to another, imports
+nothing. The fact is everything. The warrant against you exists,
+and it is in the hands of one or another of those that accompany
+you. I say no more. As I have tol' you, you should know your own
+family. But of this be sure, they mean that you go to the Tower,
+and so to your death. And now, Sir Walter, if I show you the
+disease I also bring the remedy. I am command' by my master to
+offer you a French barque which is in the Thames, and a safe
+conduct to the Governor of Calais. In France you will find safety
+and honour, as your worth deserve'."
+
+Up sprang Sir Walter from his chair, and flung off the cloak of
+thought in which he had been mantled.
+
+"Impossible," he said. "Impossible! There is my plighted word to
+return, and there are my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who are
+sureties for me. I cannot leave them to suffer by my default."
+
+"They will not suffer at all," De Chesne assured him. He was very
+well informed. "King James has yielded to Spain partly because he
+fears, partly because he will have a Spanish marriage for Prince
+Charles, and will do nothing to trouble his good relations with
+King Philip. But, after all, you have friends, whom his Majesty
+also fears. If you escape' you would resolve all his perplexities.
+I do not believe that any obstacle will be offer' to your escape--
+else why they permit you to travel thus without any guard, and to
+retain your sword?"
+
+Half distracted as he was by what he had learnt, yet Sir Walter
+clung stoutly and obstinately to what he believed to be the only
+course for a man of honour. And so he dismissed De Chesne with
+messages of gratitude but refusal to his master, and sent for
+Captain King. Together they considered all that the secretary had
+stated, and King agreed with De Chesne's implied opinion that it
+was Sir Lewis himself who held the warrant.
+
+They sent for him at once, and Ralegh straightly taxed him with
+it. Sir Lewis as straightly admitted it, and when King thereupon
+charged him with deceit he showed no anger, but only the
+profoundest grief. He sank into a chair, and took his head in his
+hands.
+
+"What could I do? What could I do?" he cried. "The warrant came
+in the very moment we were setting out. At first I thought of
+telling you; and then I bethought me that to do so would be but
+to trouble your mind, without being able to offer you help."
+
+Sir Walter understood what was implied. "Did you not say," he
+asked, "that you were my kinsman first and Vice-Admiral of Devon
+after?"
+
+"Ay--and so I am. Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral,
+which has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape,
+I'd never hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as
+closely as he watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And
+that is why I have held my peace on the score of this warrant.
+What can it help that I should trouble you with the matter until
+at the same time I can offer you some way out?"
+
+"The Frenchman has a throat, and throats can be slit," said the
+downright King.
+
+"So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them," returned
+Sir Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first
+argument, using now such forceful logic and obvious sincerity
+that Sir Walter was convinced. He was no less convinced, too, of
+the peril in which he stood. He plied those wits of his, which
+had rarely failed him in an extremity. Manourie was the
+difficulty. But in his time he had known many of these agents
+who, without sentimental interest and purely for the sake of
+gold, were ready to play such parts; and never yet had he known
+one who was not to be corrupted. So that evening he desired
+Manourie's company in the room above stairs that had been set
+apart for Sir Walter's use. Facing him across the table at which
+both were seated, Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon the
+board, and, suddenly opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady
+eyes with the jewel sparkling in his palm.
+
+"Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?"
+
+Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-
+featured fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's
+grimly smiling eyes, then again at the white diamond, from which
+the candlelight was striking every colour of the rainbow. He made
+a shrewd estimate of its price, and shook his black head. He had
+quite recovered from the shock of Sir Walter's question.
+
+"Not half as much," he confessed, with impudence.
+
+"Then you might find it more remunerative to serve me," said the
+knight. "This jewel is to be earned."
+
+The agent's eyes flickered; he passed his tongue over his lips.
+"As how?" quoth he.
+
+"Briefly thus: I have but learnt of the trammel in which I am
+taken. I must have time to concert my measures of escape, and
+time is almost at an end. You are skilled in drugs, so my kinsman
+tells me. Can you so drug me as to deceive physicians that I am
+in extremis?"
+
+Manourie considered awhile.
+
+"I . . . I think I could," he answered presently.
+
+"And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say .. two such
+stones?"
+
+The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it
+was prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir
+Walter's.
+
+"About it, then." Sir Walter rolled the gem across the board into
+the clutch of the spy, which pounced to meet it. "Keep that in
+earnest. The other will follow when we have cozened them."
+
+Next morning Sir Walter could not resume the journey. When
+Cotterell went to dress him he found his master taken with
+vomits, and reeling like a drunkard. The valet ran to fetch Sir
+Lewis, and when they returned together they found Sir Walter on
+all fours gnawing the rushes on the floor, his face livid and
+horribly distorted, his brow glistening with sweat.
+
+Stukeley, in alarm, ordered Cotterell to get his master back to
+bed and to foment him, which was done. But on the next day there
+was no improvement, and on the third things were in far more
+serious case. The skin of his brow and arms and breast was
+inflamed, and covered with horrible purple blotches--the result
+of an otherwise harmless ointment with which the French empiric
+had supplied him.
+
+When Stukeley beheld him thus disfigured, and lying apparently
+inert and but half-conscious upon his bed, he backed away in
+terror. The Vice-Admiral had seen afore-time the horrible
+manifestations of the plague, and could not be mistaken here. He
+fled from the infected air of his kinsman's chamber, and summoned
+what physicians were available to pronounce and prescribe. The
+physicians came--three in number--but manifested no eagerness to
+approach the patient closely. The mere sight of him was enough to
+lead them to the decision that he was afflicted with the plague
+in a singularly virulent form.
+
+Presently one of them plucked up courage so far as to feel the
+pulse of the apparently delirious patient. Its feebleness
+confirmed his diagnosis; moreover the hand he held was cold and
+turgid. He was not to know that Sir Walter had tightly wrapped
+about his upper arm the ribbon from his poniard, and so he was
+entirely deceived.
+
+The physicians withdrew, and delivered their verdict, whereupon
+Sir Lewis at once sent word of it to the Privy Council.
+
+That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the
+news, came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter's
+chamber by Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman's
+amazement he found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a
+hand-mirror a face that was horrible beyond description with the
+complacent smile of one who takes satisfaction in his appearance.
+Yet there was no fevered madness in the smiling eyes. They were
+alive with intelligence, amounting, indeed, to craft.
+
+"Ah, King!" was the glad welcome "The prophet David did make
+himself a fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard, to
+escape from the hands of his enemies And there was Brutus, ay,
+and others as memorable who have descended to such artifice."
+
+Though he laughed, it is clear that he was seeking to excuse an
+unworthiness of which he was conscious.
+
+"Artifice?" quoth King, aghast. "Is this artifice?"
+
+"Ay--a hedge against my enemies, who will be afraid to approach
+me."
+
+King sat himself down by his master's bed. "A better hedge
+against your enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of
+sea 'twixt here and France. Would to Heaven you had done as I
+advised ere you set foot in this ungrateful land."
+
+"The omission may be repaired," said Sir Walter.
+
+Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir
+Walter had been reconsidering De Chesne's assurance touching my
+Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, and he had come to conclude--the
+more readily, perhaps because it was as he would have it--that De
+Chesne was right; that to break faith with them were no such
+great matter after all, nor one for which they would be called
+upon to suffer. And so, now, when it was all but too late, he
+yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and consented to save
+himself by flight to France. King was to go about the business of
+procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need of
+desperate haste, as was shown when presently orders came to
+Brentford for the disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at
+Salisbury, desired that Sir Walter should be conveyed to his own
+house in London. Stukeley reported this to him, proclaiming it a
+sign of royal favour. Sir Walter was not deceived. He knew the
+reason to be fear lest he should infect the Tower with the plague
+by which he was reported stricken.
+
+So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London,
+and safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his
+loving friend and kinsman. Manourie's part being fulfilled and
+the aim accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment
+by bestowing upon him the second diamond--a form of eminently
+portable currency with which the knight was well supplied. On the
+morrow Manourie was gone, dismissed as a consequence of the part
+he had played.
+
+It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this--a very well informed
+and injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to
+forfeit the knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter
+secretly concerted means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to
+trust him?
+
+Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he
+considered King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him
+of his kinsman's general neediness, remembered past events that
+shed light upon his ways and nature, and began now at last to have
+a sense of the man's hypocrisy and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned
+in regard to him precisely as he had reasoned in regard to Manourie.
+The fellow was acquisitive, and therefore corruptible. If, indeed,
+he was so base that he had been bought to betray Sir Walter, then
+he could be bought again to betray those who had so bought him.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Sir Walter easily. "It is not lack of trust in
+you, my good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and
+knowing as I do the upright honesty of your character I feared to
+embarrass you with things whose very knowledge must give you the
+parlous choice of being false to that office or false to me."
+
+Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the
+most accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this
+should have fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too,
+he would have his cousin remember. It was unthinkable that he
+should use the knowledge he had gained to attempt to frustrate
+Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this notwithstanding
+that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose his
+office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had paid for
+it.
+
+"As to that, you shall be at no loss," Sir Walter assured him. "I
+could not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you
+shall have a thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am
+safely landed in France or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what
+is to come, here is a toy of value for you." And he presented Sir
+Lewis with a jewel of price, a great ruby encrusted in diamonds.
+
+Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir
+Lewis was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir
+Walter's plans, and to render him all possible assistance. True,
+this assistance was a costly matter; there was this person to be
+bought and that one; there were expenses here and expenses there,
+incurred by Sir Lewis on his kinsman's behalf; and there were odd
+presents, too, which Stukeley seemed to expect and which Sir
+Walter could not deny him. He had no illusions now that King had
+been right; that here he was dealing with a rogue who would exact
+the uttermost farthing for his services, but he was gratified at
+the shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's measure, and
+did not grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the scaffold.
+
+De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his
+master's offer of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such
+other assistance as Sir Walter might require But by now the
+knight's arrangements were complete. His servant Cotterell had
+come to inform him that his own boatswain, now in London, was the
+owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury, admirably suited
+for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's disposal. It had
+been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King, that they
+should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell was
+bidden desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea
+at once. In view of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily
+compromising the French envoy, Sir Walter gratefully declined the
+latter's offer.
+
+And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the
+flight. Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of
+Manourie's ointment, had practically recovered his normal
+appearance, covering his long white hair under a Spanish hat, and
+muffling the half of his face in the folds of a cloak, came to
+Wapping Stairs--that ill-omened place of execution of pirates and
+sea-rovers--accompanied by Cotterell, who carried the knight's
+cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son. Out of
+solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could
+not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage.
+At the head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the
+foot of them a boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at
+the tiller.
+
+King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
+
+"You feared perhaps we should not come," said Stukeley, with a
+sneer at the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. "Yet now, I trust,
+you'll do me the justice to admit that I have shown myself an
+honest man."
+
+The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the
+words.
+
+"I hope that you'll continue so," he answered stiffly.
+
+They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore
+glided slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the
+ebbing tide.
+
+A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-
+out, observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher
+up the river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if
+proceeding towards London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and
+follow them. Instantly he drew the attention of Sir Walter to
+that pursuing wherry.
+
+"What's this?" quoth Sir Walter harshly. "Are we betrayed?"
+
+The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their
+oars.
+
+"Put back," Sir Walter bade them. "I'll not betray my friends to
+no purpose. Put back, and let us home again."
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry.
+"We are more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose
+be such as you suspect--for which suspicion, when all is said,
+there is no ground. On then!" He addressed himself to the
+watermen, whipping out a pistol, and growing truculent in mien
+and voice. "To your oars! Row, you dogs, or I'll pistol you where
+you sit."
+
+The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But
+Sir Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the
+wisdom of keeping to their down-stream course if they were being
+followed.
+
+"But are we followed?" cried the impatient Sir Lewis. "'Sdeath,
+cousin, is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and
+must every wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us?
+If you are to halt at every shadow, faith, you'll never
+accomplish anything. I vow I am unfortunate in having a friend
+whom I would save so full of doubts and fears."
+
+Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that
+he had suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under
+Stukeley's suasion, now threw themselves heartily into their
+task, and onward sped the boat through the deepening night,
+taking but little account of that other wherry that hung ever in
+their wake. In this wise they came at length to Greenwich on the
+last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning to grow
+against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's
+enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring
+that they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
+
+Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade
+them put him ashore at Purfleet.
+
+"And that's the soundest counsel," quoth the boatswain. "For at
+Purfleet we can get horses on to Tilbury."
+
+Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical
+Captain King.
+
+"'Tis useless," he declared to them. "At this hour how shall you
+get horses to go by land?"
+
+And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other
+wherry bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent
+mists of dawn. A hail came to them across the water.
+
+"Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!" cried Ralegh bitterly, and
+Stukeley swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him.
+"Put ashore," he said shortly, "and let us home."
+
+"Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the
+enterprise, and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be
+said to me for this active assistance in your escape?" His voice
+was gloomy, his face drawn and white.
+
+"Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to
+seize on my private papers?" suggested the ingenious mind of
+Ralegh.
+
+"I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?" His loom was
+deepening to despair.
+
+Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account.
+His generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his
+friends than with his own doom. He desired to make amends to
+Stukeley, but had no means save such as lay in the power of that
+currency he used. Having naught else to give, he must give that.
+He plunged his hand into an inner pocket, and brought forth a
+handful of jewels, which he thrust upon his kinsman.
+
+"Courage," he urged him. "Up now, and we may yet win out and
+home, so that all will be well with you at least, and you shall
+not suffer for your friendship to me."
+
+Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to
+serve him.
+
+They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and
+almost at the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately
+above them. Men sprang from her, with the obvious intent of
+cutting off their retreat.
+
+"Too late!" said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion
+now that the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost.
+"You must act on my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis."
+
+"Indeed, there is no other course," Sir Lewis agreed. "And you are
+in the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined
+with me but to betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each
+supporting the other . . ."
+
+"I'll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor," roared the
+Captain furiously. "And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld
+understand my meaning."
+
+"So, so?" said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was
+observed that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken
+their stand beside him as if in readiness for action. "Why, then,
+since you will have it so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King's
+name, on a charge of abetting treason."
+
+The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer
+amazement. Then he groped for a pistol to do at last what he
+realized he should have done long since. Instantly he was
+overpowered. It was only then that Sir Walter understood the
+thing that had happened, and with understanding came fury. The
+old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his rapier
+to put it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But
+he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held
+by the men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert,
+whom he knew for Stukeley's cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert
+formally asking him for the surrender of his sword.
+
+Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked
+coldly at his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the
+growing light of the early summer dawn "Sir Lewis," was all he
+said, "these actions will not turn out to your credit."
+
+He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full
+one. His dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout,
+intending first to drain him of his resources before finally
+flinging the empty husk to the executioner. Manourie had been in
+the plot; he had run with the hare and hunted with the hounds;
+and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had done no less. Amongst
+them they had "cozened the great cozener"--to use Stukeley's own
+cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial that Sir
+Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it was
+only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant
+of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might
+the more effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter
+discovered also that the ship in which he had landed, and other
+matters, were to provide additional Judas' fees to this
+acquisitive betrayer.
+
+If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices
+unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost
+he conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond
+equal. So calm and self-possessed and masterly was his defence
+from the charge of piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and
+so shrewd in its inflaming appeal to public opinion, that his
+judges were constrained to abandon that line of prosecution, and
+could discover no way of giving his head to King James save by
+falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence of death against
+him. Of this they now ordered execution.
+
+Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it
+met death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with
+that elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He
+wore a ruff band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a
+doublet of hair-coloured satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black
+cut taffety breeches and ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his
+plumed hat he covered his white locks with a wrought nightcap.
+This last he bestowed on his way to the scaffold upon a bald-
+headed old man who had come to take a last look of him, with the
+observation that he was more in need of it than himself. When he
+had removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as
+usual. This was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the
+prison of the Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir
+Walter had put him off with a laugh and a jest.
+
+"Let them comb it that shall have it," he had said of his own
+head.
+
+Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him
+with the observation that he had a long journey before him, he
+called for the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers
+along the edge, and smiled.
+
+"Sharp medicine," quoth he, "but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the
+East:
+
+"It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his
+heart lies right," he said.
+
+Thus passed one of Englanl's greatest heroes, indeed one of the
+very makers of this England, and than his death there is no more
+shameful blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous
+James, unclean of body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the
+King of Spain.
+
+A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words--as men must
+ever suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth--declared that
+England had not such another head to cut off.
+
+As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of
+him was destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely
+forthcoming for knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught
+diminishing the gold coin of the realm by the operation known to-
+day as "clipping," and with him was taken his creature Manourie,
+who, to save himself, turned chief witness against Stukeley. Sir
+Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself by purchasing his
+pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he possessed, and
+he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of honour.
+
+Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir
+Walter Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration
+throughout the land, and to be commonly known as "Sir Judas." At
+Whitehall he suffered rebuffs and insults that found a climax in
+the words addressed to him by the Lord Admiral, to whom he went
+to give an account of his office.
+
+"Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men
+offer thyself in my presence?"
+
+For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a
+man of honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered
+at him.
+
+"What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On
+my soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the
+trees of the country would not suffice, so great is the number."
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+
+George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria
+
+
+
+He was Insolence incarnate.
+
+Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks
+had attracted the attention of King James--notoriously partial to
+good-looking lads--and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to
+his Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a
+series of acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance,
+expressing the vanity and levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely
+was he established in the royal favour than he distinguished
+himself by striking an offending gentleman in the very presence
+of his sovereign--an act of such gross disrespect to royalty that
+his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded, had not the
+maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly
+maimed.
+
+Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
+greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were
+easy to show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the
+main planks of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles
+Stuart came to lose his head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a
+martyr chiefly to the reckless, insolent, irresponsible vanity of
+this Villiers, who, from a simple country squire with nothing but
+personal beauty to recommend him, had risen to be, as Duke of
+Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
+
+The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it
+that, as John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch
+of craziness in him--of the variety, no doubt, known to modern
+psychologists as megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and
+was without respect for anybody or anything. The Commons of
+England and the immensely dignified Court of Spain--during that
+disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at Madrid--were alike the
+butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But the crowning
+insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act of
+which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the
+banks of the river Somme.
+
+Three weeks ago--on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise--Buckingham
+had arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with
+the task of conducting to England the King of France's sister,
+Henrietta Maria, who three days earlier had been married by proxy
+to King Charles.
+
+The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck
+of his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy
+passion for ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of
+France was proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury,
+Buckingham felt it due to himself to extinguish its brilliance by
+his own. On his first coming to the Louvre he literally blazed.
+He wore a suit of white satin velvet with a short cloak in the
+Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with diamonds to the
+value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond clasped
+the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of his
+sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten
+gold; the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on
+his breast. On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of
+purple satin, of intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he
+moved he shook them off like raindrops, and left them to lie
+where they fell, as largesse for pages and the lesser fry of the
+Court.
+
+His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
+effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with
+cloth of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train.
+There were musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty
+chief yeomen, a score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages,
+two dozen footmen, six outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with
+his own attendants, all arrayed as became the satellites of a
+star of such great magnitude.
+
+Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had
+set the fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the
+splendour of this superb and scintillating ambassador.
+
+Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut,
+might have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent
+assurance was proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied,
+he was conscious only that what he did could not be better done,
+and he ruffled it with an air of easy insouciance, as if in all
+this costly display there was nothing that was not normal. He
+treated with princes, and even with the gloomy Louis XIII., as
+with equals; and, becoming more and more intoxicated with his
+very obvious success, he condescended to observe approvingly the
+fresh beauty of the young Queen.
+
+Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be
+one of the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good
+height and carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a
+ravishing fairness of skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness
+had come to invest with an indefinable tenderness her splendid
+eyes. Her childless marriage to the young King of France, which
+had endured now for ten years, had hardly been successful.
+Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and difficult to
+convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof, throwing up
+between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of dislike.
+
+There is a story--and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it--
+that in the early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu
+had fallen deeply in love with her, and that she, with the
+mischief of an irresponsible young girl, had encouraged him,
+merely to betray him to a ridicule which his proud spirit had
+never been able to forgive. Be that or another the reason, the
+fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected her to his
+vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who by a
+hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King's mind, and
+thus kept ever open the gulf between the two.
+
+The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and
+admiration kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling
+figure of my Lord of Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a
+figure of romance, a prince out of a fairy-tale.
+
+That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his
+monstrous arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of
+his vanity he would add that of the love of a beautiful young
+queen. Perhaps he was thrilled in his madness by the thought of
+the peril that would spice such an adventure. Into that adventure
+he plunged forthwith. He wooed her during the eight days that he
+abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly, contemptuous of courtiers and
+of the very King himself. At the Louvre, at the Hotel de
+Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother held her
+Court, at the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the
+Queen's side.
+
+Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the
+Duke's cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart,
+and may even have resented that so shallow a man should have been
+sent to treat with a statesman of his own caliber--for other
+business beside the marriage had brought Buckingham to Paris--
+suggested to the King that the Duke's manner in approaching the
+Queen lacked a proper deference, and the Queen's manner of
+receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore the King's long
+face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he looked on.
+Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl was
+mere incense to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on
+to greater daring.
+
+On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand
+French nobles and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue,
+quitted Paris to accompany Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England,
+on the first stage of her journey to her new home. The King was
+not of the party. He had gone with Richelieu to Fontainebieau,
+leaving it to the Queen and the Queen-Mother to accompany his
+sister.
+
+Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his
+attentions upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place
+should be beside the carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did
+not apply to His Insolence of Buckingham, so indifferent of whom
+he might slight or offend. And then the devil took a hand in the
+game.
+
+At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was
+compelled to halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the
+repose she required. Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the
+presence of three queens at one and the same time within its
+walls, the Duc de Chaulnes gave an entertainment in the Citadel.
+Buckingham attended this, and in the dance that followed the
+banquet it was Buckingham who led out the Queen.
+
+Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop's Palace,
+where it was lodged, and a small company went out to take the
+evening cool in the Bishop's fragrant gardens on the Somme,
+Buckingham ever at the Queen's side. Anne of Austria was attended
+by her Mistress of the Household, the beautiful, witty Marie de
+Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, and by her equerry, Monsieur de
+Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for cavalier that handsome
+coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of Buckingham's creatures,
+between whom and herself a certain transient tenderness had
+sprung up. M. de Putange was accompanied by Madame de Vernet,
+with whom at the time he was over head and ears in love.
+Elsewhere about the spacious gardens other courtiers sauntered.
+
+Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply
+engrossed in their respective companions, or else the state of
+their own hearts and the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them
+complacently towards the affair of gallantry upon which their
+mistress almost seemed to wish to be embarked. They forgot, it
+would seem, that she was a queen, and remembered sympathetically
+that she was a woman, and that she had for companion the most
+splendid cavalier in all the world. Thus they committed the
+unpardonable fault of lagging behind, and allowing her to pass
+out of their sight round the bend of an avenue by the water.
+
+No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the
+Queen, that the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them
+from observation, than, piling audacity up on audacity, he
+determined to accomplish here and now the conquest of this lovely
+lady who had used him so graciously and received his advances
+with such manifest pleasure.
+
+"How soft the night! How exquisite!" he sighed.
+
+"Indeed," she agreed. "And how still, but for the gentle murmur
+of the river."
+
+"The river!" he cried, on a new note. "That is no gentle murmur.
+The river laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil."
+
+"Evil?" quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now
+side by side.
+
+"Evil," he repeated. "Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea
+that soon shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing
+wickedly in the pain that will presently be mine."
+
+It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide
+her discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew
+whether she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment
+upon that royal aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her
+Spanish rearing had taught her she must ever dwell.
+
+
+"Oh, but Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, you will be with us again,
+perhaps before so very long."
+
+His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near
+her face that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
+
+"Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your
+pity, say but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear
+down half a world to reach you."
+
+She recoiled in Wright and displeasure before a wooing so
+impetuous and violently outspoken; though the displeasure was
+perhaps but a passing emotion, the result of early training. Yet
+she contrived to answer him with the proper icy dignity due to
+her position as a princess of Spain, now Queen of France.
+
+"Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not
+listen to such words. You are mad, I think."
+
+"Yes, I am mad," he flung back. "Mad with love--so mad that I
+have forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the
+ambassador there is a man, under the queen a woman--our real
+selves, not the titles with which Fate seeks to dissemble our
+true natures. And with the whole strength of my true nature do I
+love you, so potently, so overwhelmingly that I will not believe
+you sensible of no response."
+
+Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little
+off her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true;
+but also a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever
+addressed her in anything approaching this manner, no one had
+ever so much as suggested that her existence could matter
+greatly, that in her woman's nature there was the magic power of
+awakening passion and devotion. He was so splendidly magnificent,
+so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus to lay his being,
+as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a little, who
+knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to repulse
+him, and the effort was not very convincing.
+
+"Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It
+. . . it hurts."
+
+O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he
+wounded, for she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But
+he in his egregious vanity must of cours e misunderstand.
+
+"Hurts!" he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have
+warned her. "Because you resist it, because you fight against the
+commands of your true self. Anne!" He seized her, and crushed her
+to him. "Anne!"
+
+Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger,
+too, her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A
+scream, loud and piercing, broke from her and rang through the
+still garden. It brought him to his senses. It was as if he had
+been lifted up into the air, and then suddenly allowed to fall.
+
+He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips,
+and when an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in
+alarm, his hand upon his sword, those two stood with the width of
+the avenue between them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen
+breathing hard and trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as
+if to repress its tumult.
+
+"Madame! Madame!" had been Putange's cry, as he sprang forward in
+alarm and self-reproach.
+
+He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other
+in bewilderment. Neither spoke.
+
+"You cried out, Madame," M. de Putange reminded her, and
+Buckingham may well have wondered whether presently he would be
+receiving M. de Putange's sword in his vitals. He must have known
+that his life now hung upon her answer.
+
+"I called you, that was all," said the Queen, in a voice that she
+strove to render calm. "I confess that I was startled to find
+myself alone with M. I'Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again,
+M. de Putange!"
+
+The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from
+his sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions
+as to what must have happened. But he was relieved there were to
+be no complications. The others now coming up with them, the
+party thereafter kept together until presently Buckingham and
+Lord Holland took their leave.
+
+On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was
+accomplished. A little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave
+of Henrietta Maria, entrusting her now to Buckingham and his
+followers, who were to convey her safely to Charles.
+
+It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to
+Anne of Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de
+Conti for only companion.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am come to take my leave."
+
+"Fare you well, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur," she said, and her voice
+was warm and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
+
+"I am come to ask your pardon, madame," he said, in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, monsieur--no more, I beg you." She looked down; her hands
+were trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
+
+He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none
+might see him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld
+tears in his eyes.
+
+"Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for
+having discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were
+idle to ask pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I
+can help drawing breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the
+will to live. I gave expression to something that dominates my
+whole being, and will ever dominate it as long as I have life.
+Adieu, madame! At need you know where a servant who will gladly
+die for you is to be found." He kissed the hem of her robe,
+dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and was gone before
+she could say a word in answer.
+
+She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti,
+watching her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
+
+"I will answer for the Queen's virtue," she stated afterwards,
+"but I cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart,
+since without doubt the Duke's tears affected her spirits."
+
+But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he
+was met by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him
+regarding the negotiations he had been empowered to carry out
+with France in the matter of an alliance against Spain--
+negotiations which had not thriven with Louis and Richelieu,
+possibly because the ambassador was ill-chosen. The instructions
+came too late to be of use, but in time to serve as a pretext for
+Buckingham's return to Amiens. There he sought an audience of the
+Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a futile message
+for the King. This chimerical business--as Madame de Motteville
+shrewdly calls it--being accomplished, he came to the real matter
+which had prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and
+sought audience of Anne of Austria.
+
+It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the
+levees at the Court of France were precisely what the word
+implies, and they were held by royalty whilst still abed. It was
+not, therefore, amazing that he should have been admitted to her
+presence. She was alone save for her lady-in-waiting, Madame de
+Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged, prudent and virtuous.
+Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of this lady upon
+seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into the room,
+and on his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and bear
+it to his lips.
+
+Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de
+Lannoi became a pillar of icy dignity.
+
+"M. le Duc," says she, "it is not customary in France to kneel
+when speaking to the Queen."
+
+"I care nothing for the customs of France, madame" he answered
+rudely. "I am not a Frenchman."
+
+"That is too obvious, monsieur," snapped the elderly, prudent and
+virtuous countess. "Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps
+monsieur will perceive the convenience of conforming to French
+customs. Let me call for a chair for Monsieur le Duc."
+
+"I do not want a chair, madame."
+
+The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, "I suppose
+one cannot expect anything else in a foreigner," and let him
+kneel as he insisted, placing herself, however, protectingly at
+the Queen's pillow.
+
+Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi's
+presence no more than if she had been part of the room's
+furniture, the Duke delivered himself freely of what was in his
+mind. He had been obliged to return to Amiens on a matter of
+State. It was unthinkable that he should be so near to her
+Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her feet; and whilst
+gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her matchless
+perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of his
+soul, allow himself the only felicity life now held for him--that
+of protesting himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the
+kind, did he pour out, what time the Queen, embarrassed and
+annoyed beyond utterance, could only stare at him in silence.
+
+Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a
+rashness beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most
+circumspect of women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and
+for the King's ears, a tale that must hopelessly compromise the
+Queen. For that, Buckingham, in his self-sufficiency and
+arrogance, appears to have cared nothing. One suspects that it
+would have pleased his vanity to have his name linked with the
+Queen's by the lips of scandal.
+
+She found her tongue at last.
+
+"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not
+necessary, it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me
+for this. You have leave to go."
+
+He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it
+perhaps to the presence of that third party to which himself he
+had been so indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled
+to his feet, and reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming
+glance of his bold eyes, and hand on heart--
+
+"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
+
+Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of
+what had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself
+had taken place under such conditions was enough to set the
+tongue of gossip wagging. An echo of it reached the King,
+together with the story of that other business in the garden, and
+he was glad to know that the Duke of Buckingham was back in
+London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against the Queen,
+sought to feed the King's suspicions.
+
+"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
+Buckingham do to make her cry out?"
+
+"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since
+she did cry out."
+
+Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
+abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he
+desired of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's
+movements, and the fullest particulars of his private life.
+
+Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful
+agents of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green
+with the Queen. For he intended to return upon one pretext or
+another before very long, and complete the conquest. Those agents
+of his were Lord Holland and the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is
+to be presumed that they served the Duke's interests well, and it
+is no less to be presumed from that which followed that they
+found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly
+romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life,
+touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
+loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in
+which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was
+away, overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there
+could be little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had
+inspired.
+
+So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--
+as La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the
+Duke a trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That
+love-token--for it amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to
+England, and delivered to the Duke.
+
+Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his
+desire to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so
+overmastering, that he at once communicated to France that he was
+coming over as the ambassador of the King of England to treat of
+certain masters connected with Spain. But Richelieu had heard
+from the French ambassador in London that portraits of the Queen
+of France were excessively abundant at York House, the Duke's
+residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform the King.
+Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
+guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride
+too deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an
+expression of Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition,
+a form of vain, empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
+
+As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke
+of Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be
+agreeable as Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty.
+Upon learning this, the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in
+proclaiming the reason ("well known to himself") and in
+protesting that he would go to France to see the Queen with the
+French King's consent or without it. This was duly reported to
+Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most Christian
+Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on the
+part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
+
+Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King
+who was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him,
+that when considered in addition to his undying rancour against
+Anne of Austria, it is easily believed he spared no pains to
+obtain something in the nature of a proof that the Queen was not
+as innocent as Louis insisted upon believing.
+
+Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among
+other matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had
+a bitter and secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between
+whom and himself there had been a passage of some tenderness too
+abruptly ended by the Duke. Richelieu, acting upon this
+information, contrived to enter into correspondence with Lady
+Carlisle, and in the course of this correspondence he managed her
+so craftily--says La Rochefoucauld--that very soon she was,
+whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most valuable spy near
+Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly concerned
+with information that would throw light upon the real relations
+of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her that
+nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
+of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment
+the more bitter for being stifled--since for her reputation's
+sake she dared not have given it expression--made her a very
+ready instrument in Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of
+gossip she did not carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But
+all was naught until one day at last she was able to tell him
+something that set his pulses beating more quickly than their
+habit.
+
+She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
+constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the
+Queen of France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her
+own. Here, indeed, was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen
+might be destroyed. Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain
+possession of the studs, the rest would be easy. There would be
+an end--and such an end!--to the King's obstinate, indolent faith
+in his wife's indifference to that boastful, flamboyant English
+upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being, and wrote
+to the Countess.
+
+Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at
+York House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young
+French Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the
+evening Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful,
+accomplished and ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found
+her charms so alluring that he was almost disposed to blame
+himself for having perhaps treated her too lightly. Yet she
+seemed at pains to show him that it was his to take up again the
+affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She was gay,
+arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that presently,
+yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
+guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the
+foot of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo
+Jones had just completed for him. My lady languished at his side,
+permitted him to encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a
+moment lay heavily against him. He caught her violently to him,
+and now her ladyship, hitherto so yielding, with true feminine
+contrariness set herself to resist him. A scuffle ensued between
+them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift as a doe across
+the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his Grace in
+pursuit between vexation and amusement.
+
+But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having
+been fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could
+discern her nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that
+she had desired her carriage to be called, and had left York
+House immediately upon coming in from the garden.
+
+He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It
+was, in fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have
+taken offense at that which she had so obviously invited. But
+then she always had been a perverse and provoking jade. With that
+reflection he put her from his mind.
+
+But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the
+great house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident
+again. Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his
+fine, pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-
+laugh, he rose to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him,
+and brought in his valet from an adjoining room. The riband of
+diamond studs was gone.
+
+Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in
+the moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there
+pale, staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There
+were upon his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one
+of which could have been more easily detached. This was the work
+of some French agent. He had made no secret of whence those studs
+had come to him.
+
+There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of
+revelation, he saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly
+contradictory behaviour. The jade had fooled him. It was she who
+had stolen the riband. He sat down again, his head in his hands,
+and swiftly, link by link, he pieced together a complete chain.
+
+Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he
+must adopt so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was
+virtually the ruler of England, master in these islands of an
+almost boundless power. That power he would exert to the full
+this very night to thwart those enemies of his own and of the
+Queen's, who worked so subtly in concert. Many would be wronged,
+much harm would be done, the liberties of some thousands of
+freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot. What did it
+matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should
+cover up an indiscretion.
+
+"Set ink and paper yonder," he bade his gaping valet. "Then go
+call M. Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at
+once, and leave word that I shall require a score of couriers to
+be in the saddle and ready to set out in half an hour."
+
+Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down
+to write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the
+ports of England were closed by the King's express command--
+delivered by his minister, the Duke of Buckingham--that measures
+were being taken--were already taken in all southern ports--so
+that no vessel of any kind should leave the island until the
+King's further pleasure were made known. Startled, the people
+wondered was this enactment the forerunner of war. Had they known
+the truth, they might have been more startled still, though in a
+different manner. As swiftly as couriers could travel--and
+certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape overseas--
+did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were tight
+locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs whirls meant
+the honour of the Queen of France.
+
+And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones
+by others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to
+say which were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and
+Gerbier between them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished,
+and a vessel slipped down the Thames, allowed to pass by those
+who kept close watch to enforce the royal decree, and made sail
+for Calais, which was beginning to manifest surprise at this
+entire cessation of traffic from England. From that vessel landed
+Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying the Queen of France
+the duplicate studs, which were to replace those which she had
+sent to Buckingham.
+
+Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and
+commerce was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-
+four hours too late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of
+Carlisle. His Eminence deplored a fine chance lost through the
+excessive power that was wielded in England by the parvenu.
+
+Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed
+and reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object
+of his desires--go to France and see the Queen. Since the country
+was closed to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of
+war. Blood should flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in
+the end he would go to Paris to negotiate a peace, and that
+should be his opportunity. Other reasons there may have been, but
+none so dominant, none that could not have been remved by
+negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the matter of the
+Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against their
+king.
+
+To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition.
+Disaster and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back
+in disgrace to England, and the Duke found himself more detested
+by the people than he had been already--which is saying much. He
+went off to seek comfort at the hands of the two persons who
+really loved him--his doting King and his splendid wife.
+
+But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
+insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
+long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies
+and mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a
+nation? He desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to
+accomplish that he nothing recked that he should set Europe in a
+blaze, nothing recked what blood should be poured out, what
+treasure dissipated.
+
+Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his
+friends, fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds,
+urged him to take precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of
+mail for greater safety.
+
+But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
+
+"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his
+contemptuous answer.
+
+He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
+the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
+superintending the final preparations for that unpopular
+expedition, John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national
+vengeance, drove a knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.
+
+"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation
+with which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances,
+there seems to have been occasion for the prayer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+
+The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+
+
+
+Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black
+winter's night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years,
+picked his way carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the
+jetty by the light of a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on
+crushed brown seaweed and trailing green sea slime. Leaning
+heavily upon the arm which a sailor held out to his assistance,
+he stepped into the waiting boat that rose and fell on the
+heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the stones, and
+the frail craft was pushed off.
+
+The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
+steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were
+swinging rhythmically high up against the black background of the
+night. The elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets,
+looked behind him--to look his last upon the England he had loved
+and served and ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow
+light upon the jetty steps, was all of it that he could now see.
+
+He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights,
+dancing there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to
+carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of
+England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened
+vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde--whose career had
+reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of
+death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere
+endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in
+the Temple when Charles I. was King.
+
+That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
+desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to
+place the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in
+Sir Edward Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels.
+The present was not to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He
+had known it, and of a bitter sort, in those impecunious days
+when the Second Charles, whose steps he guided, was a needy,
+homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal might have thrown
+over so profitless a service. He had talents that would have
+commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly adhering
+to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly in the
+Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
+achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the
+Throne of England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours
+in exile on the Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time
+was that James Stuart, Duke of York, debauched his daughter.
+
+Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the
+Restoration; it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was
+accomplished, took in hand and carried out the difficult task of
+welding together the old and the new conditions of political
+affairs. And it was Hyde who was the scapegoat when things did
+not run the course that Englishmen desired. As the head of the
+administration he was held responsible even for those acts which
+he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde who
+was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the
+money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen
+was childless.
+
+The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to
+Hyde's daughter Anne had now been righted by marri age with the
+Duke of York. Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the
+people, ever ready to attach most credit to that which is most
+incredible and fantastic, believed that to ensure the succession
+of his own grandchildren Hyde had deliberately provided Charles
+with a barren wife.
+
+When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war
+at Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde
+was openly denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with
+terror and seeking a victim in the blind, unreasoning way of
+public feeling. They broke his windows, ravaged his garden, and
+erected a gibbet before the gates of his superb mansion on the
+north side of Piccadilly.
+
+Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
+commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those
+qualities of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the
+masses. Nor did he court popularity elsewhere. Because he was
+austere in his morals, grave and sober in his conduct, he was
+hated by those who made up the debauched court of his prince.
+Because he was deeply religious in his principles, the Puritans
+mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was autocratic in his
+policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of autocracy being
+done.
+
+Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles
+been half as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles.
+For a time, it is true, the King stood his friend, and might so
+have continued to the end had not the women become mixed up in
+the business. As Evelyn, the diarist, puts it, this great man's
+fall was the work of "the buffoones and ladys of pleasure."
+
+It really is a very tangled story--this inner history of the fall
+of Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a
+sense, it is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine
+of Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have
+suffered as much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country
+where the seraglio is not a natural and proper institution.
+
+If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the
+marriage, at least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by
+Portugal, which was anxious to establish an alliance with England
+as some protection against the predatory designs of Spain. He had
+been influenced by the dowry offered--five hundred thousand
+pounds in money, Tangier, which would give England a commanding
+position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of Bombay. Without
+yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the freedom to
+trade in the East Indies--which Portugal had hitherto kept
+jealously to herself--were to enable England to build up her
+great Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were
+obvious enough to make the match desirable.
+
+Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May,
+1662, Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his
+bride at Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall--
+he stood a full six feet high--lean and elegantly vigorous. The
+ugliness of his drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the
+glory of full, low-ridded, dark eyes, and his smile could be
+irresistibly captivating. He was as graceful in manner as in
+person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent good temper that
+found expression in a charming urbanity.
+
+Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the
+wife they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth
+year, was of an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and
+short in the legs that, dressed as she was in an outlandish,
+full-skirted farthingale, she had the appearance of being on her
+knees when she stood before him. Her complexion was sallow, and
+though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not fine
+enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair
+was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great
+ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a
+pair of miniature wings.
+
+It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious
+voluptuary, with his nice discernment in women, should have
+checked in his long stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
+
+"Lord!" was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him.
+"They've brought me a bat, not a woman."
+
+But if she lacked beauty, she was well cowered, and Charles was
+in desperate need of money.
+
+"I suppose," he told Clarendon anon, "I must swallow this black
+draught to get the jam that goes with it."
+
+The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what
+time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did
+riot presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would
+he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a
+sycophant.
+
+Catherine was immediately attended--in the words of Grammont--by
+six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a
+governess who was a monster. With this retinue she repaired to
+Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was spent, and where for a
+brief season the poor woman--entirely enamoured of the graceful,
+long-legged rake she had married--lived in a fool's paradise.
+
+Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace
+of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that
+to King Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives
+de facto Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him;
+and the present wife defacto, the mistress of his heart, the
+first lady of his harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara
+Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-
+maine.
+
+There was no lack--there never is in such cases--of those who out
+of concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil
+for her, and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's
+association with my Lady Castle-maine--an association dating back
+to the time when he was still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge
+would appear to have troubled the poor soul profoundly; but the
+climax of her distress was reached when, on her coming to
+Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of ladies-in-waiting
+assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The forlorn
+little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
+that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not
+to be admitted to her presence.
+
+But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-
+tempered, debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his
+nature, manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this
+situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the
+hand into his wife's presence, before the whole Court assembled,
+and himself presented her to Catherine, what time that Court,
+dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so
+outrageous a slight to the dignity of a queen.
+
+What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
+stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually
+her face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged
+pride and mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if
+something snapped within her brain under this stress of bitter
+emotion, blood gushed from her nostrils, and she sank back in a
+swoon into the arms of her Portuguese ladies.
+
+Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light
+of love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy
+skill in handling delicate situations could avail him to save his
+royal dignity.
+
+Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was
+his wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established
+as one of the Queen's ladies--or, rather, since it was her
+ladyship's wish, and since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's
+hands--it became necessary to have the Queen instructed in what
+was, in her husband's view, fitting. For this task he selected
+Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long and loyally played
+Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide him in
+matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.
+
+Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated
+with Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his
+Majesty was bent.
+
+"Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who
+shall not be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel
+at her decision in this instance."
+
+"Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be
+revoked."
+
+"By whom, sire?" the Chancellor asked him gravely.
+
+"By her Majesty, of course."
+
+"Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument," said
+Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from
+the latter's boyhood. "Yourself, sire, at a time when your own
+wishes did not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing
+that now you are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your
+cousin, King Louis, for thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon
+his queen. You will not have forgotten the things you said then
+of King Louis."
+
+Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
+invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting
+himself in check.
+
+But anon--no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my
+Lady Castlemaine--he returned to the attack, and sent the
+Chancellor his orders in a letter demanding unquestioning
+obedience.
+
+"Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I
+am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find
+to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise
+upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He
+knew his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a
+variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter
+draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon.
+Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen
+that bitter, threatening line: "Whosoever I find to be my Lady
+Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to
+be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing
+unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded.
+All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be
+swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.
+
+Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that
+odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of
+sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious
+to the Queen than to himself.
+
+That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr.
+Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following
+day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between
+the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so
+stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the
+neighbouring chambers.
+
+You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
+Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
+husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
+affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
+Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant
+whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-
+nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally threatening
+her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to
+Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he
+thrust upon her here.
+
+Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail,
+prevail it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and
+submitted. And a very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine
+was not only installed as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon
+we find the Queen treating her with a friendliness that provoked
+comment and amazement.
+
+The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
+insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor,
+of whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was
+aware. Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful
+bitterness that is inseparable from the nature of such women. And
+she hated him the more because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he
+moved in utter unconcern of her hostility. In this hatred she
+certainly did not lack for allies, members of that licentious
+court whose hostility towards the austere Chancellor was begotten
+of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked to pull him
+down.
+
+The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving
+vain--for Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the
+Chancellor's value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously
+and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the
+public ignorance--most fruitful soil for scandal against the
+great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were
+responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord
+Clarendon's gatepost:
+
+                    Three sights to be seen:
+             Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
+
+Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
+Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as
+stable as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was,
+it follows that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious
+jealousies to mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her
+how insecure is the tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the
+mercy of the very caprice to existence.
+
+And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for
+her, a day when she found herself bereft of her influence with
+her royal lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway
+him. In part she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in
+far greater measure to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed,
+fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still found
+pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and
+lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by
+the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was
+become the toast of the day.
+
+This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre,
+newly come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How
+profound an impression her beauty made upon the admittedly
+impressionable old Pepys you may study in his diary. He had a
+glimpse of her one day riding in the Park with the King, and a
+troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine, looking, as he
+tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when Miss
+Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
+she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found
+its way into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more
+perdurable than that of any actual queen) in the figure of
+Britannia, for which she was the model.
+
+Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study
+appearances in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became
+customary in that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at
+Whitehall to inquire whether he were above or below--"below"
+meaning Miss Stewart's apartments on the ground-floor of the
+palace, in which apartments his Majesty was a constant visitor.
+And since where the King goes the Court follows, and where the
+King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted that this child
+now found herself queering it over a court that flocked to her
+apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
+gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
+
+About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
+iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with
+curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one
+night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there
+into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached out for cards, or
+for a share of the heaps of gold that swept this way and that
+with the varying fortunes of the game.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester,
+played in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had
+lost, it is true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal
+gamester, and one who came easily by money, she had been known to
+lose ten times that sum and yet preserve her smile. The source of
+her ill-humour was not the game. She played recklessly, her
+attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers were
+intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long
+room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
+gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a
+vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only
+purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and
+here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants,
+and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who
+was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms of
+architecture.
+
+Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather,
+lounged the King, languidly observing this smaller party, a
+faint, indolent smile o n his swarthy, saturnine countenance.
+Absently, with one hand he stroked a little spaniel that was
+curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous, plumed turban and a
+long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold--there were three or
+four such attendants about the room--proffered him a cup of
+posses on a golden salver.
+
+The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his
+spaniel under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table.
+Soon he found himself alone with her--the others having removed
+themselves on his approach, as jackals fall back before the
+coming of the lion. The last to go, and with signs of obvious
+reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond, a delicately-built,
+uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
+
+Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards
+standing between them.
+
+Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
+architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled
+down to a mere heap of cards again.
+
+"Symbol of kingly power," said Miss, pertly. "You demolish better
+than you build, sire."
+
+"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,"
+quoth he.
+
+"Pray do. The cards are here."
+
+"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But
+such is not the castle I'll build you if you command me."
+
+"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
+surely."
+
+"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes
+were oddly ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"
+
+Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
+distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
+
+"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen
+must prove a prison."
+
+She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome,
+scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine
+looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her." She
+was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double
+meaning to her speech. "Shall we go see how she is faring?" she
+added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also
+doubted.
+
+He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially
+with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic
+urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was
+no more than a mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that
+pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him
+and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly
+simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.
+
+"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
+prove a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to
+queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?
+
+It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew
+there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon,
+which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the
+grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of
+Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the King's divorce.
+
+It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be
+largely responsible for the existence of that party. In her
+hatred for Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would
+slay the Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least
+helped to give currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had
+deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure
+the ultimate succession of his own daughter's children. But she
+had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now
+did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in
+consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very
+moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
+artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
+
+It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that
+party's mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as
+perhaps it did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed.
+He looked at Buckingham, frowning.
+
+"I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England."
+
+The impudent gallant made a leg. "For a subject, sire, I believe
+I am."
+
+Charles--with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
+compelling than the serious--laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then
+he sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
+
+"It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only
+because she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no
+fault of hers."
+
+He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature
+shrank from purchasing his desires at the price of so much
+ignominy to the Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be
+necessary to give the screw of temptation another turn or two.
+And it was Miss Stewart herself who--in all innocence--supplied
+what was required in that direction. Driven to bay by the
+importunities of Charles, she announced at last that it was her
+intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve herself from
+the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine the
+uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
+occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so
+desperate had she been rendered that she would marry any
+gentleman of fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have her in
+honour.
+
+You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to
+bribe her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or
+any title she coveted, offering her these things at the nation's
+expense as freely and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into
+her lap, or the collar of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he
+had put about her neck. The offers were ineffectual, and Charles,
+driven almost to distraction by such invulnerable virtue, might
+now have yielded to the insidious whispers of divorce and re-
+marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the game.
+
+Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
+infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
+a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered
+with bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the
+Chancellor had recoiled upon herself.
+
+In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost
+dead, she made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the
+ineffable Chiffinch, Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-
+Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio, who was her ladyship's friend, made
+it and communicated it to her There had been one ardent
+respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that proclamation of Miss
+Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here his
+opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in
+constant attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared
+the King's displeasure.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well
+served in the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came
+one cold night towards the end of February of that year 1667.
+Charles, going below at a late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when
+he judged that she would be alone, was informed by her maid that
+Miss was not receiving, a headache compelling her to keep her
+room.
+
+His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
+confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine.
+Chiffinch had introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles
+stiffened at sight of her.
+
+"I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage," says she, on a note
+of irony, "although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me
+at my own house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction
+and grief into which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman
+Stewart has reduced your Majesty."
+
+"You are pleased to be amused, ma'am," says Charles frostily.
+
+"I will not," she returned him, "make use of reproaches which
+would disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse
+frailties in myself which nothing can justify, since your
+constancy for me deprives me of all defence." Her ladyship, you
+see, had a considerable gift of sarcasm.
+
+"In that case, may I ask you why you have come?"
+
+"To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made
+the jest of your own Court."
+
+"Madam!"
+
+"Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at
+for the gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the
+Stewart's affectations, any more than you know that whilst you
+are denied admittance to her apartments, under the presence of
+some indisposition, the Duke of Richmond is with her now."
+
+"That is false," he was beginning, very indignantly.
+
+"I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow
+me, you will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes
+you act so ridiculous a part."
+
+She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence
+led him, despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately
+come. Outside her rival's door she left him, but she paused at
+the end of the gallery to make sure that he had entered.
+
+Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
+chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them
+informing him scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been
+very ill since his Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she
+was, God be thanked, in a very fine sleep.
+
+"That I must see," said the King. And, since one of the women
+placed herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty
+unceremoniously took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
+
+He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony
+into the well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the
+handsome, canopied bed. But far from being as he had been told,
+in "a very fine sleep," she was sitting up; and far from
+presenting an ailing appearance, she looked radiantly well and
+very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with golden
+ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
+sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved
+upon scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
+
+The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid
+eyes lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might
+have expected that he would now deliver himself with that
+sneering sarcasm, that indolent cynicism, which he used upon
+occasion. But he was too deeply stirred for acting. His self-
+control deserted him entirely. Exactly what he said has not been
+preserved for us. All that we are told is that he signified his
+resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and that
+his Grace, almost petrified by the King's most royal rage,
+uttered never a word in answer. The windows of the room
+overlooked the Thames. The King's eyes strayed towards them.
+Richmond was slight of build, Charles vigorous and athletic. His
+Grace took the door betimes lest the window should occur to his
+Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with the outraged monarch.
+
+Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss
+Stewart faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own,
+and she was very far from attempting any such justification of
+herself, or her conduct, as he may have expected.
+
+"Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your
+complaint?" she invited him challengingly.
+
+That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn.
+His jaw fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this
+she took the fullest advantage.
+
+"If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
+Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am
+a slave in a free country. I know of no engagement that should
+prevent me from disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this
+is not permitted me in your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe
+there is any power on earth can prevent me going back to France,
+and throwing myself into a convent, there to enjoy the peace
+denied me at this Court."
+
+With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was
+complete. On his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury
+he had done her. But Miss was not in a forgiving humour.
+
+"If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in
+peace," said she, "you would avoid offending by a longer visit
+those who accompanied or conducted you to my apartments."
+
+She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went
+home Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak
+to her again, he stalked out.
+
+Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he
+must also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and
+that in his conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely
+ridiculous. She was rightly resolved against being lightly worn
+by any man. If anything, the reflection must have fanned his
+passion. It was impossible, he thought, that she should love that
+knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no graces either of body or
+of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit, it must be, as she
+had all but said, so that she might be delivered from the
+persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought
+of her marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to
+Charles, and it may have stifled his last scruple in the matter
+of the divorce.
+
+His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the
+Court. But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The
+King's messenger found him gone already.
+
+Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
+Clarendon's habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke
+to the King--taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary
+position in which for the last twenty-five years he had stood to
+him--much as he had spoken when Charles had proposed to make
+Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, saving that he
+was now even more uncompromising. The King was not pleased with
+him. But just as he had had his way, despite the Chancellor, in
+that other matter, so he would have his way despite him now.
+This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too
+much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no
+effort to avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured
+Queen. So he went secretly to work to outwit the King. He made
+himself the protector of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and
+Miss Stewart, with the result that one dark night, a week or two
+later, the lady stole away from the Palace of White-hall, and
+made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the Bridge-foot, Westminster,
+where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And so, by the secret
+favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent and
+matrimony.
+
+That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of
+things in his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks
+later that he learnt by whose agency the thing had been
+accomplished. He learnt it, not a doubt, from my Lady
+Castlemaine.
+
+The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated
+back to the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was
+at last made up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant,
+and firmly established in the amorous King's affections. She had
+cause to be grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her
+vindictive nature remembered only the earlier injury still
+unavenged. Here at last was her chance to pay off that score.
+Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand, yet trusting in the
+King whom he had served so well, stood his ground unintimidated
+and unmoved--an oak that had weathered mightier storms than this.
+He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil woman. And
+that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told the
+King of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest
+the King should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of
+consideration for his motives, represented him as a self-seeker,
+and charged him with having acted thus so as to make sure of
+keeping his daughter's children by the Duke of York in the
+succession.
+
+That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw
+Clarendon to the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him
+with a command that he should surrender his seals of office. The
+proud old man refused to yield his seals to any but the King
+himself. He may have hoped that the memory of all that lay
+between them would rise up once more when they were face to face.
+So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
+deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile
+throng of courtiers--"especially the buffoones and ladys of
+pleasure," as Evelyn says.
+
+Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has
+left us a vivid picture:
+
+"When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine
+was in bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her
+smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither
+her woman brought her her nightgown; and she stood, blessing
+herself at the old man's going away; and several of the gallants
+of Whitehall--of which there were many staying to see the
+Chancellor's return--did talk to her in her birdcage; among
+others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of passage."
+
+Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine
+house in Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered
+Strafford's fate, and set out to tread once more and for the
+remainder of his days the path of exile.
+
+Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--
+reigned successively as queens in England.
+
+
+
+
+
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+
+Count Philip Koenigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+
+
+
+He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
+particularly in England, where he had been associated with his
+brother in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century
+did not look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of
+fortune; and so it condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip
+Christof Koenigsmark for the sake of his personal beauty, his
+elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address. The court
+of Hanover made him warmly welcome, counting itself the richer
+for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was retained there by
+the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he had been
+appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
+Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who
+later was to reign in England as King George I.
+
+His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had
+been playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where
+Koenigsmark had been brought up. With adolescence he had gone out
+into the world to seek the broader education which it offered to
+men of quality and spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the
+infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be
+met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met
+him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
+more brightly against the dull background of that gross
+Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
+the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
+
+The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a
+different kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been
+married in 1682, at the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years
+of wedded life to the fulfilment of the handsome promise of her
+maidenhood. But her beauty was spiritualized by a certain
+wistfulness that had not been there before, that should not have
+been there now had all been well. The sprightliness inherent in
+her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
+bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
+to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a
+little reckless of how or where it offended.
+
+Koenigsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and
+knew enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her
+thwarted love for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted
+for the sake of dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying
+her to the Electoral Prince George the whole of the Duchy of
+Luneberg might be united. Thus, for political reasons, she had
+been thrust into a union that was mutually loveless; for Prince
+George had as little affection to bring to it as herself. Yet for
+a prince the door to compensations is ever open. Prince George's
+taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and this taste
+he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness
+towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was
+eventually converted into disgust and contempt.
+
+Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on
+her side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by
+his father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the
+latter by the Countess von Platen.
+
+Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of
+state, was--with the connivance of her despicable husband, who
+saw therein the means to his own advancement--the acknowledged
+mistress of Ernest Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and
+ill-favoured woman. Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted
+face, and peered from her mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the
+Elector Ernest loved her. His son's taste for ugly women would
+appear to have been hereditary.
+
+Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The
+princess had mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not
+only had she never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that
+detestable woman inspired in her, but she had actually given it
+such free and stinging expression as had provoked against Madame
+von Platen the derision of the court, a derision so ill-concealed
+that echoes of it had reached its object, and made her aware of
+the source from whence it sprang.
+
+It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the
+elegant, romantic Koenigsmark took place. He found the stage set
+for comedy of a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by
+his recklessness, to convert into tragedy.
+
+It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him.
+It was some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he
+did not lack for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-
+esteem that blinded him here to the appalling truth. Yet in the
+end understanding came to him. When the precise significance of
+the fond leer of that painted harridan's repellent coquetry was
+borne in upon him he felt the skin of his body creep and roughen
+But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal scamp, after all, and
+in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to employ his gifts
+and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as to win to
+eminence. He saw that the Elector's favourite could be of use to
+him; and it is not your adventurer's way to look too closely into
+the nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.
+
+Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so
+long as her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility
+detrimental. But once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was
+firmly in his grasp, and an intimate friendship had ripened
+between himself and Prince Charles--the Elector's younger son--
+sufficiently to ensure his future, he plucked off the mask and
+allied himself with Sophia in her hostility towards Madame von
+Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter, whilst on a
+visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups a
+droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at
+Madame von Platen's hands.
+
+It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But
+there was one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the
+Countess, and you conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused
+in her. Her rage was the greater for being stifled. It was
+obviously impossible for her to appeal to her lover, the Elector,
+to avenge her. From the Elector, above all others, must the
+matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would she forgo
+the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere all
+was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer
+who had flouted her be made to pay.
+
+The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more
+or less directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite
+against Sophia. This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into
+the arms of the Electoral Prince. Melusina, who was years
+afterwards to be created Duchess of Kendal, had not yet attained
+to that completeness of lank, bony hideousness that was later to
+distinguish her in England. But even in youth she could boast of
+little attraction. Prince George, however, was easily attracted.
+A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to over-eating, heavy
+drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina von
+Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as maitresse en-titre
+took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at
+Herrenhausen, a ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.
+
+Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her
+dullard husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her
+contempt of him now left her, yet in the affront thus publicly
+offered her, she felt that the limit of endurance had been
+reached. Next day it was found that she had disappeared from
+Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at Zell.
+
+But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom
+and levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the
+dignity of her rank; recommended her to use in future greater
+prudence, and a proper, wifely submission; and, the homily
+delivered, packed her back to her husband at Herrenhausen.
+
+George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She
+had been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of
+respect for him. She must learn what was due to her station, and
+to her husband. He would thank her to instruct herself in these
+matters against his return from Berlin, whither he was about to
+journey, and he warned her that he would suffer no more tantrums
+of that kind.
+
+Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
+frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
+
+Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him,
+and leaving hate and despair behind.
+
+It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a
+true friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to
+rescue her from her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her
+elbow, against this dreadful need, Destiny had placed her
+sometime playmate, her most devoted friend--as she accounted
+him, and as, indeed, he was--the elegant, reckless Koenigsmark,
+with his beautiful face, his golden mane, and his unfathomable
+blue eyes.
+
+Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the
+formal gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and
+ungraceful as those who had built and who inhabited it--she
+opened her heart to him very fully, allowed him, in her
+overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things which for very shame
+she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept nothing
+back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish husband,
+told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
+had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had
+beaten her upon occasion.
+
+Koenigsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of
+his emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when
+she came at last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
+
+"It is enough, madame," he cried. "I swear to you, as Heaven
+hears me, that he shall be punished."
+
+"Punished?" she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him
+with a smile of sad incredulity. "It is not his punishment I
+seek, my friend, but my own salvation."
+
+"The one can be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly,
+and struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of
+this lout as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to
+Berlin to-night."
+
+The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell
+apart, as she looked at him aghast.
+
+"Why, what would you do? What do you mean?" she asked him.
+
+"I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of
+you, madame."
+
+She shook her head. "Princes do not fight," she said, on a note
+of contempt.
+
+"I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative--unless,
+indeed, he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put
+an affront on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have
+made him valiant enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even
+that will not answer, and he still shields himself behind his
+rank--why, there are other ways to serve him." He was thinking,
+perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
+
+The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed
+the poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy,
+and starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
+
+"My friend, my friend!" she cried, on a note that quivered and
+broke. "You are mad--wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What
+would become of you if you did this?"
+
+He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
+gesture. "Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become
+of you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service
+being rendered . . ." He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands
+and let them fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He
+was the complete courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic preux-
+chevalier all in one.
+
+She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat
+in her white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful
+face. If ever she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss
+Koenigsmark in that moment, but as she might have kissed a loving
+brother, in token of her deep gratitude for his devotion to her
+who had known so little true devotion.
+
+"If you knew," she said, "what balsam this proof of your
+friendship has poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would
+understand my utter lack of words in which to thank you. You
+dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no expression for my
+gratitude."
+
+"I ask no gratitude," quoth he. "I am all gratitude myself that
+you should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask
+your leave to serve you in my own way."
+
+She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
+
+He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. "Serve me
+if you will--God knows I need the service of a loyal friend--but
+serve me as I shall myself decide--no other way."
+
+"But what alternative service can exist?" he asked, almost
+impatiently.
+
+"I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place--to quit
+Hanover, never to return."
+
+"But to go whither?"
+
+"Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this
+hateful life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find
+shelter at Zell, as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought
+of my children, I should have fled long ago. For the sake of
+those two little ones I have suffered patiently through all these
+years. But the limit of endurance has been reached and passed.
+Take me away. Koenigsmark!" She was clutching his lapels again.
+"If you would really serve me, help me to escape."
+
+His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
+breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden
+kindling of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones.
+These sensitive, romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion,
+ever ready to yield to the adventure of it.
+
+"My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Koenigsmark while
+he has life." Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still
+holding them, he bowed low over them, so low that his heavy
+golden mane tumbled forward on either side of his handsome head
+to form a screen under cover of which he pressed his lips upon
+her fingers.
+
+She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough
+reward for so much devotion.
+
+"I thank you again," she breathed. "And now I must think--I must
+consider where I can count upon finding refuge."
+
+That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion
+was, no doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of
+his horse, and so ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom
+for her with his sword. Her sober words dispelled the dream,
+revealed to him that it was not quite intended he should
+hereafter be her custodian. And there for the moment the matter
+was suspended.
+
+Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered
+that an Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted
+interview, accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-
+kissings, within sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it
+happened, behind one of those windows lurked the Countess von
+Platen, watching them jealously, and without any disposition to
+construe the meeting innocently. Was she not the deadly enemy of
+both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon her, and had not
+Koenigsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and then
+unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth
+of profligates?
+
+That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the
+Elector.
+
+"Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour
+in his absence?"
+
+"George's honour?" quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
+Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the
+notion of guarding something whose existence was not easily
+discerned. He had no sense of humour, as his appearance
+suggested. He was a short, fat man with a face shaped like a
+pear--narrow in the brow and heavy in the jowl. "What the devil
+do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"I mean that this foreign adventurer, Koenigsmark, and Sophia grow
+too intimate."
+
+"Sophia!" Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the
+line of his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent
+creases expressive of contempt.
+
+"That white-faced ninny! Bah!" Her very virtue was matter for
+his scorn.
+
+"It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly," replied the
+Countess, out of her worldly wisdom. "Listen a moment now." And
+she related, with interest rather than discount, you may be sure,
+what she had witnessed that afternoon.
+
+The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia,
+and he felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to
+Zell. Then, too, being a libertine, and the father of a
+libertine, it logically followed that unchastity in his women-
+folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.
+
+He heaved himself out of his deep chair. "How far has this
+gone?" he demanded.
+
+Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that
+might afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need,
+if she could trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would
+presently afford her all the evidence required to damn the pair.
+She said as much, and promised the Elector that she would
+exercise herself the latter quality in his son's service. Again
+the Elector did not find it grotesque that his mistress should
+appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.
+
+The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal--though
+George's honour was the least thing that concerned her. What
+concerned her was the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of
+Koenigsmark. So she watched assiduously, and set others, too, to
+watch for her and to report. And almost daily now she had for the
+Elector a tale of whisperings and hand-pressings, and secret
+stolen meetings between the guilty twain. The Elector enraged,
+and would have taken action, but that the guileful Countess
+curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could not
+be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the
+offenders, might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing
+the Duke of Zell to his daughter's aid. So they must wait yet
+awhile until they held more absolute proof of this intrigue.
+
+And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the
+Elector with word that Koenigsmark and the Princess had shut
+themselves up together in the garden pavilion. Let him come at
+once, and he should so discover them for himself, and thus at
+last be able to take action. The Countess was flushed with
+triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent--and Madame von Platen
+could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen,
+conceive it innocent--it was in an Electoral Princess an
+unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view,
+which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in
+the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen
+following. He came too late, despite the diligence of his spy.
+
+Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been
+a brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in
+all particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her
+cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure--for the sake
+of what once had lain between them--would not now refuse to
+shelter and protect her. Of Koenigsmark she desired that he should
+act as her escort to her cousin's court.
+
+Koenigsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing
+that he regretted. At Wolfenbuttelyy, having served Sophia
+faithfully, his ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find
+expression. She would make all dispositions, and advise him when
+she was ready to set out. But they must use caution, for they
+were being spied upon. Madame von Platen's over-eagerness had in
+part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their consciousness of
+espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting in the
+seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
+Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
+
+The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his
+hands, his eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when
+Ernest Augustus burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen
+lingering just beyond the threshold. The Elector's face was
+apoplectically purple from rage and haste, his breath came in
+wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept round the chamber, and
+fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled Koenigsmark.
+
+"Where is the Princess?" he blurted out.
+
+The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had
+the scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of
+innocent mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
+
+"Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?"
+
+At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance
+over his shoulder at the Countess.
+
+"I was told that her Highness was here," he said.
+
+"Plainly," said Koenigsmark, with perfect calm, "you have been
+misinformed." And his quiet glance and gesture invited the
+Elector to look round for himself.
+
+"How long have you been here yourself?" Feeling at a
+disadvantage, the Elector avoided the direct question that was in
+his mind.
+
+"Half an hour at least."
+
+"And in that time you have not seen the Princess?"
+
+"Seen the Princess?" Koenigsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. "I
+scarcely understand your Highness."
+
+The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked
+down, then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's
+glove.
+
+"What's this?" quoth he. "Whose glove is this?"
+
+If Koenigsmark's heart missed a beat--as well it may have done--
+he did not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost
+laughed.
+
+"Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me
+questions that only a seer could answer."
+
+The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously
+suspicious glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid,
+one of Sophia's women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
+
+"What do you want?" the Elector snapped at her.
+
+"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer,
+innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had
+been too hastily dispatched to avert.
+
+The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
+laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to
+Koenigsmark.
+
+"You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an
+honest man. Will you now tell me without any more of this,
+precisely what the Princess Sophia was doing here with you?"
+
+Koenigsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the
+furnace of the Elector's face.
+
+"Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a
+prince is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady
+whose spotless purity is beyond his understanding. But your
+Highness can hardly expect me to become in never so slight a
+degree a party to that insult by vouchsafing any answer to your
+question."
+
+"That is your last word, sir?" The Elector shook with suppressed
+anger.
+
+"Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?"
+
+The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust
+forth in scorn and menace.
+
+"You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard,
+and as that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no
+reason why your sojourn here should be protracted."
+
+Koenigsmark bowed stiffly, formally. "It shall end, your Highness,
+as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my
+departure--in a week at most."
+
+"You are accorded three days, sir." The Elector turned, and
+waddled out, leaving Koenigsmark to breathe freely again. The
+three days should suffice for the Princess also. It was very
+well.
+
+The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given
+this troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and
+placed his daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von
+Platen was the only one concerned who thought that it was not
+well at all, the consummation being far from that which she had
+desired. She had dreamt of a flaming scandal, that should utterly
+consume her two enemies, Sophia and Koenigsmark. Instead, she saw
+them both escaping, and the fact that she was--as she may have
+supposed--effectively separating two loving hearts could be no
+sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
+Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more
+germane to her desires.
+
+The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet
+confident that at worst she could justify it, and little fearing
+that the worst would happen, she boldly went to work. She forged
+next day a brief note in which the Princess Sophia urgently bade
+Koenigsmark to come to her at ten o'clock that night in her own
+apartments, and with threat and bribe induced the waiting woman
+of the glove to bear that letter.
+
+Now it so happened that Koenigsmark, through the kind offices of
+Sophia's maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in
+the secret of their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that
+morning, briefly stating the urgency of departure, and begging
+her so to arrange that she could leave Herrenhausen with him on
+the morrow. He imagined the note now brought him to be in answer
+to that appeal of his. Its genuineness he never doubted, being
+unacquainted with Sophia's writing. He was aghast at the rashness
+which dictated such an acsignation, yet never hesitated as to
+keeping it. It was not his way to hesitate. He trusted to the
+gods who watch over the destinies of the bold.
+
+And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with
+having dealt too softly with the Dane.
+
+"Bah!" said the Elector. "To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are
+rid of him. Is not that enough?"
+
+"Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already,"
+quoth she.
+
+"Now what will you be hinting?" he asked her peevishly.
+
+"I'll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this.
+Koenigsmark has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this
+very night at ten o'clock--and where do you suppose? In her
+Highness's own apartments."
+
+The Elector came to his feet with an oath. "That is not true!" he
+cried. "It cannot be!"
+
+"Then I'll say no more," quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin
+lips.
+
+"Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it
+suffice you that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing
+this profligate you have sufficiently avenged the honour of your
+son."
+
+"My God, if I thought this were true...." He choked with rage,
+stood shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
+
+"The truth is easily ascertained," said Madame. "Conceal yourself
+in the Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best
+go attended, for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been
+known aforetime to practice murder."
+
+Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men
+together, Koenigsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's
+antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her
+Highness of his visit. Sophia had already retired to bed, and
+the amazing announcement of the Count's presence there startled
+her into a fear of untoward happenings. She was overwhelmed, too,
+by the rashness of this step of his, coming after the events
+of yesterday. If it should be known that he had visited her
+thus, terrible consequences might ensue. She rose, and with
+Mademoiselle de Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive him. Yet
+for all that she made haste, the precious irreclaimable moments
+sped.
+
+She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
+propriety's sake.
+
+"What is it?" she asked him breathlessly. "What brings you here
+at such an hour?"
+
+"What brings me?" quoth he, surprised at that reception. "Why,
+your commands--your letter."
+
+"My letter? What letter?"
+
+A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He
+plucked forth the treacherous note, and proffered it.
+
+"Why, what does this mean?" She swept a white hand over her eyes
+and brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her
+vision. "That is not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream
+I should be imprudent as to bid you hither, and at such an hour
+How could you dream it?"
+
+"You are right," said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm,
+perhaps in sheer bitter mirth. "It will be, no doubt, the work of
+our friend, Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest,
+my travelling chaise will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow
+by the Markt Kirck in Hanover, and I shall wait within it. I
+shall hope to conduct you safely to Wolfenbuttelyy."
+
+"I will come, I will come. But go now--oh, go!"
+
+He looked very deeply into her eyes--a valedictory glance against
+the worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and
+kissed it, and so departed.
+
+He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of
+stairs, and pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He
+passed through, and thrust the door behind him, then stood a
+moment looking round the vast apartment. If he was too late to
+avoid the springs of the baited trap, it was here that they
+should snap upon him. Yet all was still. A single lamp on a table
+in the middle of the vast chamber shed a feeble, flickering
+light, yet sufficient to assure him that no one waited here. He
+sighed relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set out swiftly
+to cross the hall.
+
+But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the
+tall stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after
+him.
+
+He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged
+his sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the
+man who for ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to
+depend upon his blade. That swift action sealed his doom. Their
+orders were to take him living or dead, and standing in awe of
+his repute, they were not the men to incur risks. Even as he came
+on guard, a partisan grazed his head, and another opened his
+breast.
+
+He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright
+golden hair, and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat,
+yet his right hand still desperately clutching his useless sword.
+
+His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike
+again, and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he
+suddenly beheld the Countess von Platen materializing out of the
+surrounding shadows as it seemed, and behind her the squat,
+ungraceful figure of the Elector. He fought for breath.
+"I am slain," he gasped, "and as I am to appear before my Maker
+I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is innocent. Spare her at
+least, your Highness."
+
+"Innocent!" said the Elector hoarsely. "Then what did you now in
+her apartments?
+
+"It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who . . ."
+
+The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the
+lips of the dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the
+halberts finished him off, and he was buried there and then, in
+lime, under the floor of the Hall of Knights, under the very spot
+where he had fallen, which was long to remain imbrued with his
+blood.
+
+Thus miserably perished the glittering Koenigsmark, a martyr to
+his own irrepressible romanticism.
+
+As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared
+his fate that night. She was placed under arrest next morning,
+and Prince George was summoned back from Berlin at once.
+
+The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not
+suffered, for he was disposed to let the matter drop, content
+that they should remain in the forbidding relations which had
+existed between them before this happening. But Sophia was
+uncompromising in her demand for strict justice.
+
+"If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you," she told him. "If
+innocent, you are unworthy of me."
+
+There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
+divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no
+faintest evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content
+to pronounce the divorce upon the ground of her desertion.
+
+She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in
+vain. She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on
+the Ahlen, to drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-
+two years of life.
+
+Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that
+on her death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to
+her sometime husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months
+later, as King George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that
+letter was placed in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into
+Germany. It contained Sophia's dying declaration of innocence,
+and her solemn summons to King George to stand by her side before
+the judgment-seat of Heaven within a year, and there make answer
+in her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her blighted
+life and her miserable death.
+
+King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading
+of that letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died
+in his carriage next day--the 9th of June, 1727--on the road to
+Osnabruck.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
+
+
+
+Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her
+lover in the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word--for
+he never so much as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew
+of his existence.
+
+The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld
+her in the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting
+corollary to her action. She in her way and he in his were alike
+sublime; her tranquil martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism
+and his exultant martyrdom upon the altar of Love were alike
+splendidly futile.
+
+It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It
+has its pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no
+might-have-been which death had thwarted. Because she died, he
+loved her; because he loved her, he died. That is all, but for
+the details which I am now to give you.
+
+The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter
+of a landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chetive
+noblesse, a man of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may
+have predisposed him against the law of entail or primogeniture--
+the prime cause of the inequality out of which were sprung so
+many of the evils that afflicted France. Like many of his order
+and condition he was among the earliest converts to Republicanism--
+the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding constitutional government
+of the people by the people, holding monarchical and aristocratic
+rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
+
+From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican
+doctrines to which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she
+rejoiced when the hour of awakening sounded and the children of
+France rose up and snapped the fetters in which they had been
+trammelled for centuries by an insolent minority of their fellow-
+countrymen.
+
+In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a
+transient phase--horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion
+of that awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal
+government of her dreams would follow--must follow, since among
+the people's elected representatives was a goodly number of
+unselfish, single-minded men of her father's class of life; men
+of breeding and education, impelled by a lofty altruistic
+patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party presently to
+be known as the Girondins.
+
+But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least
+another. And this other in the National Assembly was that of the
+Jacobins, less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party
+in which stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as
+Robespierre, Danton,--and Marat.
+
+Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood
+for Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins
+arraigned Marat and Robespierre for complicity in the September
+massacres, and thereby precipitated their own fall. The triumphant
+acquittal of Marat was the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins,
+and the proscription of twenty-nine deputies followed at once as
+the first step. These fled into the country, hoping to raise an
+army that should yet save France, and several of the fugitives
+made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and oratory they
+laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were gifted,
+able men, eloquent speakers and skilled writers, and they might
+have succeeded but that in Paris sat another man no less gifted,
+and with surer knowledge of the temper of the proletariat,
+tirelessly wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of
+inflaming the passions of the mob.
+
+That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner,
+sometime professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish
+University of St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many
+sociological works, inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary
+journalist, proprietor and editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of
+the Parisian rabble, who had bestowed upon him the name borne by
+his gazette, so that he was known as The People's Friend.
+
+Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic,
+Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived
+and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were
+all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de
+Medecine in Paris he span with his clever, wicked pen a web that
+paralysed their high endeavours and threatened finally to choke
+them.
+
+He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate
+in which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the
+Girondins he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and
+implacable of the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday--the friend
+and associate now of the proscribed Girondins who had sought
+refuge in Caen--he loomed so vast and terrible as to eclipse his
+associates entirely. To her young mind, inflamed with enthusiasm
+for the religion of Liberty as preached by the Girondins, Marat
+was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening to corrupt that
+sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and to replace
+the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
+still.
+
+She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to
+raise an army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches
+of the Jacobins. An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw
+in it a sign that Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On
+the lips of her friends the Girondins she caught again the name
+of Marat, the murderer of Liberty; and, brooding, she reached a
+conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter which she wrote about
+that time.
+
+"As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the
+friends of law and humanity."
+
+From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent
+it was but a step. That step she took. She may have considered
+awhile the proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have
+come to her with realization. She understood that a great
+sacrifice was necessary; that who undertook to rid France of that
+unclean monster must go prepared for self-immolation. She counted
+the cost calmly and soberly--for calm and sober was now her every
+act.
+
+She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach
+from Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had
+written:
+
+"I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
+possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in
+France. On leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it
+I shall no longer be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of
+living together, as it has denied us other happinesses. May it
+show itself more clement to our country. Good-by, dear Father.
+Embrace my sister for me, and do not forget me."
+
+That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was
+intended to save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her
+identity should remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the
+very Hall of the Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat.
+Thus Paris should behold Nemesis overtaking the false Republican
+in the very Assembly which he corrupted, and anon should adduce a
+moral from the spectacle of the monster's death. For herself she
+counted upon instant destruction at the hands of the furious
+spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified, she trusted that
+her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great tidings
+that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
+of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
+
+You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of
+this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the
+Paris diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the
+Republic--1793, old style. She was becomingly dressed in brown
+cloth, a lace fichu folded across her well-developed breast, a
+conical hat above her light brown hair. She was of a good height
+and finely proportioned, and her carriage as full of dignity as
+of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness that a contemporary
+compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was gray-eyed, and,
+like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face squaring a little
+at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her habit, calm
+her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and calm
+the mind reflected in all this.
+
+And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the
+open country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the
+errand upon which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-
+receiving mission, can shake that normal calm. Here is no wild
+exaltation, no hysterical obedience to hotly-conceived impulse.
+Here is purpose, as cold as it is lofty, to liberate France and
+pay with her life for the privilege of doing so.
+
+That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared
+her ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan
+moved with pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations,
+sustained by the heady wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly
+indulged, towards a goal of triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly
+in the stuffy diligence with the quiet conviction that her days
+were numbered.
+
+So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one
+among them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous
+attentions, and actually proposed marriage to her before the
+coach had rolled over the bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days
+later.
+
+She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux
+Augustine, where she engaged a room on the first floor, and then
+she set out in quest of the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of
+introduction to him from the Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she
+had been on friendly terms at Caen. Duperret was to assist her to
+obtain an interview with the Minister of the Interior. She had
+undertaken to see the latter on the subject of certain papers
+relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an old convent friend
+of her own, and she was in haste to discharge this errand, so as
+to be free for the great task upon which she was come.
+
+From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was
+ill, and confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change
+of plans, and the relinquishing of her project of affording him a
+spectacular death in the crowded hall of the Convention.
+
+The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the
+business of her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose
+early, and by six o'clock she was walking in the cool gardens of
+the Palais Royal, considering with that almost unnatural calm of
+hers the ways and means of accomplishing her purpose in the
+unexpected conditions that she found.
+
+Towards eight o'clock, when Paris was awakening to the business
+of the day and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler's
+shop in the Palais Royal, and bought for two francs a stout
+kitchen knife in a shagreen case. She then returned to her hotel
+to breakfast, and afterwards, dressed in her brown travelling-
+gown and conical hat, she went forth again, and, hailing a
+hackney carnage, drove to Marat's house in the Rue de l'Ecole de
+Medecine.
+
+But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The
+Citizen Marat was ill, she was told, and could receive no
+visitors. It was Simonne Everard, the triumvir's mistress--later
+to be known as the Widow Marat--who barred her ingress with this
+message.
+
+Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter
+to the triumvir:
+
+"Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic.
+"Citizen,--I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country
+leads me to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the
+unfortunate events which are taking place in that part of the
+Republic. I shall therefore call upon you towards one o'clock.
+Have the kindness to receive me, and accord me a moment's
+audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering a great service
+to France.
+"Marie Corday."
+
+Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late
+afternoon waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of
+receiving any, she wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
+
+"I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter?
+May I hope for a moment's audience? If you have received my
+letter, I hope you will not refuse me, considering the importance
+of the matter. It should suffice for you that I am very
+unfortunate to give me the right to your protection."
+
+Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown--you observe this
+further manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no
+departure from the ordinary habits of life--she goes forth to
+deliver in person this second letter, the knife concealed in the
+folds of the muslin fichu crossed high upon her breast.
+
+In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room
+of that house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, the People's
+Friend is seated in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he
+is obeying, for in all France there is no man more filthy in his
+person and his habits than this triumvir. His bath is medicated.
+The horrible, loathsome disease that corrodes his flesh demands
+these long immersions to quiet the gnawing pains which distract
+his active, restless mind. In these baths he can benumb the
+torment of the body with which he is encumbered.
+
+For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more--leastways, nothing
+more that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs
+and organs he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay.
+His very lack of personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he
+lives, the insufficient sleep which he allows himself, his habit
+of careless feeding at irregular intervals, all have their source
+in his contempt for the physical part of him. This talented man
+of varied attainments, accomplished linguist, skilled physician,
+able naturalist and profound psychologist, lives in his intellect
+alone, impatient of all physical interruptions. If he consents to
+these immersions, if he spends whole days seated in this
+medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or cools the
+fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend his
+mind to the work that ishis life. But his long-suffering body is
+avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been
+submitted. The morbid condition of the former is being
+communicated to the latter, whence results that disconcerting
+admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and exalted sensibility which
+marked his nature in the closing years of his life.
+
+In his bath, then, sat the People's Friend on that July evening,
+immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his
+emaciated body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years
+of age, dying of consumption and other things, so that, did
+Charlotte but know it, there is no need to murder him. Disease
+and Death have marked him for their own, and grow impatient.
+
+A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty
+wooden box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of
+paper, and two or three copies of L'Ami do Peuple. There was no
+sound in the room but the scratch and splutter of his quill. He
+was writing diligently, revising and editing a proof of the
+forthcoming issue of his paper.
+
+A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in
+which he was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption,
+until it disturbed and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his
+bath, listened a moment, then, with intent to make an end of the
+interruption, he raised a hoarse, croaking voice to inquire what
+might be taking place.
+
+The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge,
+entered the room. She was fully twenty years younger than
+himself, and under the slattern appearance which life in that
+house had imposed upon her there were vestiges of a certain
+comeliness.
+
+"There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently
+to see you upon a matter of national importance."
+
+The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in
+that leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old
+foes of his, the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
+
+"She says," Simonne continued, "that she wrote a letter to you
+this morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have
+told her that you will not receive anyone, and . . ."
+
+"Give me the note," he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust
+out an unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne's
+hand. He spread it, and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his
+eyes narrowing to slits.
+
+"Let her in," he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him
+without more ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone
+together--the avenger and her victim. For a moment each regarded
+the other. Marat beheld a handsome young woman, elegantly
+attired. But these things had no interest for the People's
+Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of beauty? Charlotte
+beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and was full
+satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
+confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot
+out.
+
+Then Marat spoke. "So you are from Caen, child?" he said. "And
+what is doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?"
+
+She approached him.
+
+"Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat."
+
+"Rebellion, ha!" It was a sound between a laugh and a croak.
+"Tell me what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their
+names." He took up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of
+paper towards him.
+
+She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him,
+erect and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the
+Girondins, whilst hunched there in his bath his pen scratched
+briskly.
+
+"So many for the guillotine," he snarled, when it was done.
+
+But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her
+fichu, and as he uttered those words of doom to others his own
+doom descended upon him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by
+that strong young arm, the long, stout blade was buried to its
+black hilt in his breast.
+
+He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as
+he sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
+
+"Help, chere amie! Help!" he cried, and was for ever silent.
+
+The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the
+bath at the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank
+sideways in the same direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon
+his right shoulder, whilst from the great rent in his breast the
+blood gushed forth, embruing the water of his bath, trickling to
+the brick-paved floor, bespattering--symbolically almost--a copy
+of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal to which he had devoted so much
+of his uneasy life.
+
+In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
+sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a
+tigress, she sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by
+the head, and calling loudly the while for assistance. Came
+instantly from the anteroom Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of
+the house, and Laurent Basse, a folder of Marat's paper; and now
+Charlotte found herself confronted by four maddened, vociferous
+beings, at whose hands she may well have expected to receive the
+death for which she was prepared.
+
+Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of
+it across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his
+fury to have battered her to death, but for the arrival of gens
+d'armes and the police commissioner of the district, who took her
+in their protecting charge.
+
+The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became
+known. All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the
+revolutionary rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch
+upon the house wherein the People's Friend lay dead.
+
+That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte
+Corday lay in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude
+the indignities that for a woman were almost inseparable from
+revolutionary incarceration. She preserved throughout her
+imperturbable calm, based now upon a state of mind content in the
+contemplation of accomplished purpose, duty done. She had saved
+France, she believed; saved Liberty, by slaying the man who would
+have strangled it. In that illusion she was content. Her own life
+was a small price to pay for the splendid achievement.
+
+Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her
+friends, in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she
+had done, expounding fully the motives that had impelled her,
+dwelling upon the details of the execution, and of all that had
+followed. Among the letters written by her during those "days of
+the preparation of peace "--as she calls that period, dating in
+such terms a long epistle to Barbaroux--was one to the Committee
+of Public Safety, in which she begs that a miniature-painter may
+be sent to her to paint her portrait, so that she may leave this
+token of remembrance to her friends. It is only in this, as the
+end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought for her
+own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
+instrument in the hands of Fate.
+
+On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began
+before the Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall
+as she appeared in her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and
+calm--always calm.
+
+The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of
+the cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
+
+"These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat."
+
+The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to
+examine her.
+
+"What was the object of your visit to Paris?" he asks.
+
+"To kill Marat."
+
+"What motives induced you to this horrible deed?"
+
+"His many crimes."
+
+"Of what crimes do you accuse him?"
+
+"That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive
+the fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator;
+that he sought to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by
+causing the arrest and imprisonment of the deputies to the
+Convention on May 31st."
+
+"What proof have you of this?"
+
+"The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a
+mask of patriotism."
+
+Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
+
+"Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+Montane shook his head. "You cannot convince anyone that a person
+of your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless
+instigated by some person or persons whom you are unwilling to
+name."
+
+Charlotte almost smiled. "That shows but a poor knowledge of the
+human heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the
+strength of one's own hatred than upon that of others." And then,
+raising her voice, she proclaimed: "I killed one man to save a
+hundred thousand; I killed a villain to save innocents; I killed
+a savage Wild-beast to give repose to France. I was a Republican
+before the Revolution. I never lacked for energy."
+
+What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established.
+Her fearless self-ossession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-
+Tinville, the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her
+so virginal and fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal
+had not had the best of it, he sought with a handful of
+revolutionary filth to restore the balance. He rose slowly, his
+ferrety eyes upon her.
+
+"How many children have you had?" he rasped, sardonic, his tone a
+slur, an insult.
+
+Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed,
+disdainful, as she answered coldly:
+
+"Have I not stated that I am not married?"
+
+A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the
+impression he sought to convey, and he sat down again.
+
+It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed
+to defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had
+been intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering
+him to remain silent, another from the President bidding him
+declare her mad.
+
+Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable;
+it satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his
+client. It uttered the whole truth.
+
+"The prisoner," he said, "confesses with calm the horrible crime
+she has committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she
+confesses its most dreadful details; in short, she confesses
+everything, and does riot seek to justify herself. That, citizens
+of the jury, is her whole defence. This imperturbable calm, this
+utter abnegation of self, which displays no remorse even in the
+very presence of death, are contrary to nature. They can only be
+explained by the excitement of political fanaticism which armed
+her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to judge what
+weight that moral consideration should have in the scales of
+justice."
+
+The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full
+sentence of the law.
+
+It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the
+antechamber of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent
+to her, but she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his
+ministrations. She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received
+the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in
+accordance with her request. And during the sitting, which lasted
+half an hour, she conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics,
+the tranquillity of her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death
+that was so swiftly approaching.
+
+The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He
+carried the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination.
+She showed no dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that
+the time spent with Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged
+for a few moments in which to write a note, and, the request
+being granted, acquitted herself briskly of that task, then
+announcing herself ready, she removed her cap that Sanson might
+cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking his scissors, she
+herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for remembrance. When
+Sanson would have bound her hands, she begged that she might be
+allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by the
+cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat's house. He
+answered that she might do so if she wished, but that it was
+unnecessary, as he could bind her without causing pain.
+
+"To be sure," she said, "those others had not your experience,"
+and she proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further
+demur. "If this toilet of death is performed by rude hands," she
+commented, "at least it leads to immortality."
+
+She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and,
+disdaining the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to
+show herself dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce
+was that rage, indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that
+the tumbril proceeded at a crawl, and the people surging about
+the cart screamed death and insult at the doomed woman. It took
+two hours to reach the Place de la Revolution, and meanwhile a
+terrific summer thunderstorm had broken over Paris, and a
+torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed streets.
+Charlotte's garments were soaked through and through, so that her
+red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
+skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a
+reflection of the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her
+cheeks, and thus heightened her appearance of complete composure.
+
+And it is now in the Rue St. Honore that at long last we reach
+the opening of our tragic love-story.
+
+A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux--sent to Paris by the
+city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention--
+was standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
+accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy
+and of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never
+practiced owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered
+anatomical work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted
+imagination, unhappily married--the not uncommon fate of such
+delicate temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had
+heard, as all Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of
+the trial, and he waited there, curious to see this woman, with
+whose deed he was secretly in sympathy.
+
+The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled
+up around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full
+of life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed
+upon her, standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of
+those about him, he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and
+paid homage to her. She did not see him. He had not thought that
+she would. He saluted her as the devout salute the unresponsive
+image of a saint. The tumbril crawled on. He turned his head, and
+followed her with his eyes for awhile; then, driving his elbows
+into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a passage
+through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
+gaze, a man entranced.
+
+He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the
+last he had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable
+calm, and in the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the
+great knife his voice suddenly rang out.
+
+"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added,
+addressing those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were
+beautiful to have died with her!"
+
+He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at
+that moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's
+attendant, who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped
+the cheek with his hand. The story runs that the dead face
+reddened under the blow. Scientists of the day disputed over this,
+some arguing from it a proof that consciousness does not at once
+depart the brain upon decapitation.
+
+That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded
+with copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of
+Republicanism, the deliverer of France, in which occurs the
+comparison with Joan of Arc, that other great heroine of France.
+This was the work of Adam Lux. He made no secret of it. The
+vision of her had so wrought upon the imagination of this
+susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such enthusiasm,
+that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
+expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last
+moments of life she had inspired him.
+
+Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
+urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her
+act, placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately
+demanded for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in
+this manifesto that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term
+"tyrannicide." That document he boldly signed with his own name,
+realizing that he would pay for that temerity with his life.
+
+He was arrested on the 24th of July--exactly a week from the day
+on which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they
+exerted themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and
+release if he would publicly retract what he had written. But he
+laughed the proposal to scorn, ardently resolved to follow into
+death the woman who had aroused the hopeless, immaterial love
+that made his present torment.
+
+Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor
+named Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that
+the sight of Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a
+paper on this plea, recommending that clemency be shown to the
+young doctor on the score of his affliction, and that he should
+be sent to a hospital or to America. Adam Lux was angry when he
+heard of this, and protested indignantly against the allegations
+of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la Montagne, which
+published his declaration on the 26th of September, to the effect
+that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his
+anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his
+sanity.
+
+He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of
+October, when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it
+joyously, in a mood of exultation at his approaching deliverance.
+He assured the court that he did not fear the guillotine, and
+that all ignominy had been removed from such a death by the pure
+blood of Charlotte.
+
+They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.
+
+"Forgive me, sublime Charlotte," he exclaimed, "if I should find
+it impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness
+that were yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right
+that the adored should be above the adorer."
+
+Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers
+had been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic
+exaltation. At five o'clock that same afternoon he stepped from
+the tumbril under the gaunt shadow of the guillotine. He turned
+to the people, his eyes bright, a flush on his cheeks.
+
+"At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte," he
+told them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the
+bridegroom on his way to the nuptial altar.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+by Rafael Sabatini
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series
+
+Author: Rafael Sabatini
+
+Release Date: April, 2005  [EBook #7949]
+[This file was first posted on June 4, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Text scanned by J. C. Byers.  Proofreading by Abdulh Ameed Alhassan.
+
+
+
+THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES
+
+by RAFAEL SABATINI
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+David Whitelaw
+
+My Dear David,
+
+Since the narratives collected here as well as in the preceding
+volume under the title of the Historical Nights Entertainment--
+narratives originally published in The Premier Magazine, which
+you so ably edit--owe their being to your suggestion, it is
+fitting that some acknowledgment of the fact should be made. To
+what is hardly less than a duty, allow me to add the pleasure of
+dedicating to you, in earnest of my friendship and esteem, not
+merely this volume, but the work of which this volume is the
+second.
+
+Sincerely yours,
+
+Rafael Sabatini
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the
+Historical Nights Entertainment, issued in December of 1917, has
+encouraged me to prepare the second series here assembled.
+
+As in the case of the narratives that made up the first volume,
+I set out again with the same ambitious aim of adhering
+scrupulously in every instance to actual, recorded facts; and
+once again I find it desirable at the outset to reveal how far
+the achievement may have fallen short of the admitted aim.
+
+On the whole, I have to confess to having allowed myself perhaps
+a wider latitude, and to having taken greater liberties than was
+the case with the essays constituting the previous collection.
+This, however, applies, where applicable, to the parts rather
+than to the whole.
+
+The only entirely apocryphal narrative here included is the
+first--"The Absolution." This is one of those stories which, if
+resting upon no sufficient authority to compel its acceptance,
+will, nevertheless, resist all attempts at final refutation,
+having its roots at least in the soil of fact. It is given in the
+rather discredited Portuguese chronicles of Acenheiro, and finds
+place, more or less as related here, in Duarte Galvao's
+"Chronicle of Affonso Henriques," whence it was taken by the
+Portuguese historical writer, Alexandre Herculano, to be included
+in his "Lendas e Narrativas." If it is to be relegated to the
+Limbo of the ben trovato, at least I esteem it to afford us a
+precious glimpse of the naive spirit of the age in which it is
+set, and find in that my justification for including it.
+
+The next to require apology is "His Insolence of Buckingham," but
+only in so far as the incident of the diamond studs is concerned.
+The remainder of the narrative, the character of Buckingham, the
+details of his embassy to Paris, and the particulars of his
+audacious courtship of Anne of Austria, rest upon unassailable
+evidence. I would have omitted the very apocryphal incident of
+the studs, but that I considered it of peculiar interest as
+revealing the source of the main theme of one of the most famous
+historical romances ever written--"The Three Musketeers." I give
+the story as related by La Rochefoucauld in his "Memoirs," whence
+Alexandre Dumas culled it that he might turn it to such excellent
+romantic account. In La Rochefoucauld's narrative it is the
+painter Gerbier who, in a far less heroic manner, plays the part
+assigned by Dumas to d'Artagnan, and it is the Countess of
+Carlisle who carries out the political theft which Dumas
+attributes to Milady. For the rest, I do not invite you to attach
+undue credit to it, which is not, however, to say that I account
+it wholly false.
+
+In the case of "The _Hermosa Fembra_" I confess to having
+blended together into one single narrative two historical
+episodes closely connected in time and place. Susan's daughter
+was, in fact, herself the betrayer of her father, and it was in
+penitence for that unnatural act that she desired her skull to be
+exhibited as I describe. Into the story of Susan's daughter I
+have woven that of another New-Christian girl, who, like the
+Hermosa Fembra, her taken a Castilian lover--in this case a youth
+of the house of Guzman. This youth was driven into concealment in
+circumstances more or less as I describe them. He overheard the
+judaizing of several New-Christians there assembled, and bore
+word of it at once to Ojeda. The two episodes were separated in
+fact by an interval of three years, and the first afforded Ojeda
+a strong argument for the institution of the Holy Office in
+Seville. Between the two there are many points of contact, and
+each supplies what the other lacks to make an interesting
+narrative having for background the introduction of the
+Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely
+fictitious, and the introduction of Torquemada is quite
+arbitrary. Ojeda was the inquisitor who dealt with both cases.
+But if there I stray into fiction, at least I claim to have
+sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand Inquisitor as I know
+him from fairly exhaustive researches into his life and times.
+
+The story of the False Demetrius is here related from the point
+of view of my adopted solution of what is generally regarded as a
+historical mystery. The mystery lies, of course, in the man's
+identity. He has been held by some to have been the unfrocked
+monk, Grishka Otropiev, by others to have been a son of Stephen
+Bathory, King of Poland. I am not aware that the theory that he
+was both at one and the same time has ever been put forward, and
+whilst admitting that it is speculative, yet I claim that no
+other would appear so aptly to fit all the known facts of his
+career or to shed light upon its mysteries.
+
+Undoubtedly I have allowed myself a good deal of licence and
+speculation in treating certain unwitnessed scenes in "The
+Barren Wooing." But the theory that I develop in it to account
+for the miscarriage of the matrimonial plans of Queen Elizabeth
+and Robert Dudley seems to me to be not only very fully warranted
+by de Quadra's correspondence, but the only theory that will
+convincingly explain the events. Elizabeth, as I show, was widely
+believed to be an accessory to the murder of Amy Robsart. But in
+carefully following her words and actions at that critical time,
+as reported by de Quadra, my reading of the transaction is as
+given here. The most damning fact against Elizabeth was held to
+be her own statement to de Quadra on the eve of Lady Robert
+Dudley's murder to the effect that Lady Robert was "already dead,
+or very nearly so." This foreknowledge of the fate of that
+unfortunate lady has been accepted as positive evidence that the
+Queen was a party to the crime at Cumnor, which was to set her
+lover free to marry again. Far from that, however, I account it
+positive proof of Elizabeth's innocence of any such part in the
+deed. Elizabeth was far too crafty and clear-sighted not to
+realize how her words must incriminate her afterwards if she knew
+that the murder of Lady Robert was projected. She must have been
+merely repeating what Dudley himself had told her; and what he
+must have told her--and she believed--was that his wife was at
+the point of a natural death. Similarly, Dudley would not have
+told her this, unless his aim had been to procure his wife's
+removal by means which would admit of a natural interpretation.
+Difficulties encountered, much as I relate them--and for which
+there is abundant evidence--drove his too-zealous agents to
+rather desperate lengths, and thus brought suspicion, not only
+upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent Queen. The
+manner of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be
+far from what actually took place. The possibility of an
+accident--extraordinarily and suspiciously opportune for Dudley
+as it would have been--could not be altogether ruled out but for
+the further circumstance that Lady Robert had removed everybody
+from Cumnor on that day. To what can this point--unless we accept
+an altogether incredible chain of coincidence--but to some such
+plotting as I here suggest?
+
+In the remaining six essays in this volume the liberties taken
+with the absolute facts are so slight as to require no apology or
+comment.
+
+R. S.
+
+London, June, 1919.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+     Affonso Henriques, First King of Portugal
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+     Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+     An Episode of the Inquisition in Seville
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+     The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+V. THE END OF THE VERT GALANT
+     The Assassination of Henry IV
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+     The Murder of Amy Robsart
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+     The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+     George Villiers' Courtship of Anne of Austria
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+     The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+     Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+     Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat
+
+
+
+
+
+I. THE ABSOLUTION
+
+Aftonso Henriques, first King of Portugal
+
+
+
+In 1093 the Moors of the Almoravide dynasty, under the Caliph
+Yusuf, swept irresistibly upwards into the Iberian Peninsula,
+recapturing Lisbon and Santarem in the west, and pushing their
+conquest as far as the river Mondego.
+
+To meet this revival of Mohammedan power, Alfonso VI. Of Castile
+summoned the chivalry of Christendom to his aid. Among the
+knights who answered the call was Count Henry of Burgundy
+(grandson of Robert, first Duke of Burgundy) to whom Alfonso gave
+his natural daughter Theresa in marriage, together with the
+Counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the title of Count of
+Portugal.
+
+That is the first chapter of the history of Portugal.
+
+Count Henry fought hard to defend his southern frontiers from the
+incursion of the Moors until his death in 1114. Thereafter his
+widow Theresa became Regent of Portugal during the minority of
+their son, Affonso Henriques. A woman of great energy, resource
+and ambition, she successfully waged war against the Moors, and
+in other ways laid the foundations upon which her son was to
+build the Kingdom of Portugal. But her passionate infatuation for
+one of her knights--Don Fernando Peres de Trava--and the
+excessive honours she bestowed upon him, made enemies for her in
+the new state, and estranged her from her son.
+
+In 1127 Alfonso VII. of Castile invaded Portugal, compelling
+Theresa to recognize him as her suzerain. But Affonso Henriques,
+now aged seventeen--and declared by the citizens of the capital
+to be of age and competent to reign--incontinently refused to
+recognize the submission made by his mother, and in the following
+year assembled an army for the purpose of expelling her and her
+lover from the country. The warlike Theresa resisted until
+defeated in the battle of San Mamede and taken prisoner.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+He was little more than a boy, although four years were sped
+already since, as a mere lad of fourteen, he had kept vigil
+throughout the night over his arms in the Cathedral of Zamora,
+preparatory to receiving the honour of knighthood at the hands of
+his cousin, Alfonso VII. of Castile. Yet already he was looked
+upon as the very pattern of what a Christian knight should be,
+worthy son of the father who had devoted his life to doing battle
+against the Infidel, wheresoever he might be found. He was
+well-grown and tall, and of a bodily strength that is almost a
+byword to this day in that Portugal of which he was the real
+founder and first king. He was skilled beyond the common wont in
+all knightly exercises of arms and horsemanship, and equipped
+with far more learning--though much of it was ill-digested, as
+this story will serve to show--than the twelfth century
+considered useful or even proper in a knight. And he was at least
+true to his time in that he combined a fervid piety with a
+weakness of the flesh and an impetuous arrogance that was to
+bring him under the ban of greater excommunication at the very
+outset of his reign.
+
+It happened that his imprisonment of his mother was not at all
+pleasing in the sight of Rome. Dona Theresa had powerful friends,
+who so used their influence at the Vatican on her behalf that the
+Holy Father--conveniently ignoring the provocation she had given
+and the scandalous, unmotherly conduct of which she had been
+guilty--came to consider the behaviour of the Infante of Portugal
+as reprehensibly unfilial, and commanded him to deliver Dona
+Theresa at once from duress.
+
+This Papal order, backed by a threat of excommunication in the
+event of disobedience, was brought to the young prince by the
+Bishop of Coimbra, whom he counted among his friends.
+
+Affonso Henriques, ever impetuous and quick to anger, flushed
+scarlet when he heard that uncompromising message. His dark eyes
+smouldered as they considered the aged prelate.
+
+"You come here to bid me let loose again upon this land of
+Portugal that author of strife, to deliver over the people once
+more to the oppression of the Lord of Trava?" he asked. "And you
+tell me that unless by obeying this command I am false to the
+duty I owe this country, you will launch the curse of Rome
+against me? You tell me this?"
+
+The bishop, deeply stirred, torn between his duty to the Holy See
+and his affection for his prince, bowed his head and wrung his
+hands. "What choice have I?" he asked, on a quavering note.
+
+"I raised you from the dust." Thunder was rumbling in the
+prince's voice. "Myself I placed the episcopal ring upon your
+finger."
+
+"My lord, my lord! Could I forget? All that I have I owe to you--
+save only my soul, which I owe to God; my faith, which I owe to
+Christ; and my obedience, which I owe to our Holy Father the
+Pope."
+
+The prince considered him in silence, mastering his passionate,
+impetuous nature. "Go," he growled at last.
+
+The prelate bowed his head, his eyes not daring to meet his
+prince's.
+
+"God keep you, lord," he almost sobbed, and so went out.
+
+But though stirred by his affection for the prince to whom he
+owed so much, though knowing in his inmost heart that Affonso
+Henriques was in the right, the Bishop of Coimbra did not swerve
+from his duty to Rome, which was as plain as it was unpalatable.
+Betimes next morning word was brought to Affonso Henriques in the
+Alcazar of Coimbra that a parchment was nailed to the door of the
+Cathedral, setting forth his excommunication, and that the
+Bishop--either out of fear or out of sorrow--had left the city,
+journeying northward towards Oporto.
+
+Affonso Henriques passed swiftly from incredulity to anger; then
+almost as swiftly came to a resolve, which was as mad and
+harebrained as could have been expected from a lad in his
+eighteenth year who held the reins of power. Yet by its very
+directness and its superb ignoring of all obstacles, legal and
+canonical, it was invested with a certain wild sanity.
+
+In full armour, a white cloak simply embroidered in gold at the
+edge and knotted at the shoulder, he rode to the Cathedral,
+attended by his half-brother Pedro Affonso, and two of his
+knights, Emigio Moniz and Sancho Nunes. There on the great
+iron-studded doors he found, as he had been warned, the Roman
+parchment pronouncing him accursed, its sonorous Latin periods
+set forth in a fine round clerkly hand.
+
+He swung down from his great horse and clanked up the Cathedral
+steps, his attendants following. He had for witnesses no more
+than a few loiterers, who had paused at sight of their prince.
+
+The interdict had so far attracted no attention, for in the
+twelfth century the art of letters was a mystery to which there
+were few initiates.
+
+Affonso Henriques tore the sheepskin from its nails, and crumpled
+it in his hand; then he passed into the Cathedral, and thence
+came out presently into the cloisters. Overhead a bell was
+clanging by his orders, summoning the chapter.
+
+To the Infante, waiting there in the sun-drenched close, came
+presently the canons, austere, aloof, majestic in their unhurried
+progress through the fretted cloisters, with flowing garments and
+hands tucked into their wide sleeves before them. In a semi-
+circle they arrayed themselves before him, and waited impassively
+to learn his will. Overhead the bell had ceased.
+
+Affonso Henriques wasted no words.
+
+"I have summoned you," he announced, "to command that you proceed
+to the election of a bishop."
+
+A rustle stirred through the priestly throng. The canons looked
+askance at the prince and at one another. Then one of them spoke.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," he said gravely, and several instantly made
+chorus: "We have a bishop."
+
+The eyes of the young sovereign kindled. "You are wrong," he told
+them. "You had a bishop, but he is here no longer. He has
+deserted his see, after publishing this shameful thing" And he
+held aloft the crumpled interdict. "As I am a God-fearing,
+Christian knight, I will not live under this ban. Since the
+bishop who excommunicated me is gone, you will at once elect
+another in his place who shall absolve me."
+
+They stood before him, silent and impassive, in their priestly
+dignity, and in their assurance that the law was on their side.
+
+"Well?" the boy growled at them.
+
+"Habemus episcopum," droned a voice again.
+
+"Amen," boomed in chorus through the cloisters.
+
+"I tell you that your bishop is gone," he insisted, his voice
+quivering now with anger, "and I tell you that he shall not
+return, that he shall never set foot again within my city of
+Coimbra. Proceed you therefore at once to the election of his
+successor."
+
+"Lord," he was answered coldly by one of them, "no such election
+is possible or lawful."
+
+"Do you dare stand before my face, and tell me this?" he roared,
+infuriated by their cold resistance. He flung out an arm in a
+gesture of terrible dismissal. "Out of my sight, you proud and
+evil men! Back to your cells, to await my pleasure. Since in your
+arrogant, stiff-necked pride you refuse to do my will, you shall
+receive the bishop I shall myself select."
+
+He was so terrific in his rage that they dared not tell him that
+he had no power, prince though he might be, to make such an
+election, bowed to him, ever impassively, and with their hands
+still folded, unhurried as they had come, they now turned and
+filed past him in departure.
+
+He watched them with scowling brows and tightened lips, Moniz and
+Nunes silent behind him. Suddenly those dark, watchful eyes of
+his were held by the last figure of all in that austere
+procession--a tall, gaunt young man, whose copper-coloured skin
+and hawk-featured face proclaimed his Moorish blood. Instantly,
+maliciously, it flashed through the prince's boyish mind how he
+might make of this man an instrument to humble the pride of that
+insolent clergy. He raised his hand, and beckoned the cleric to
+him.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked him.
+
+"I am called Zuleyman, lord," he was answered, and the name
+confirmed--where, indeed, no confirmation was necessary--the
+fellow's Moorish origin.
+
+Affonso Henriques laughed. It would be an excellent jest to
+thrust upon these arrogant priests, who refused to appoint a
+bishop of their choice, a bishop who was little better than a
+blackamoor.
+
+"Don Zuleyman," said the prince, "I name you Bishop of Coimbra in
+the room of the rebel who has fled. You will prepare to celebrate
+High Mass this morning, and to pronounce my absolution."
+
+The Christianized Moor fell back a step, his face paling under
+its copper skin to a sickly grey. In the background, the hindmost
+members of the retreating clerical procession turned and stood at
+gaze, angered and scandalized by what they heard, which was
+indeed a thing beyond belief.
+
+"Ah no, my lord! Ah no!" Don Zuleyman was faltering. "Not that!"
+
+The prospect terrified him, and in his agitation he had recourse
+to Latin. "Domine, non sum dignus," he cried, and beat his
+breast.
+
+But the uncompromising Affonso Henriques gave him back Latin for
+Latin.
+
+"Dixi--I have spoken!" he answered sternly. "Do not fail me in
+obedience, on your life." And on that he clanked out again with
+his attendants, well-pleased with his morning's work.
+
+As he had disposed with boyish, almost irresponsible rashness,
+and in flagrant contravention of all canon law, so it fell out.
+Don Zuleyman, wearing the bishop's robes and the bishop's mitre,
+intoned the Kyrie Eleison before noon that day in the Cathedral
+of Coimbra, and pronounced the absolution of the Infante of
+Portugal, who knelt so submissively and devoutly before him.
+
+Affonso Henriques was very pleased with himself. He made a jest
+of the affair, and invited his intimates to laugh with him. But
+Emigio Moniz and the elder members of his council refused to
+laugh. They looked with awe upon a deed that went perilously near
+to sacrilege, and implored him to take their own sober view of
+the thing he had done.
+
+"By the bones of St. James!" he cried. "A prince is not to be
+brow-beaten by a priest."
+
+Such a view in the twelfth century was little short of
+revolutionary. The chapter of the Cathedral of Coimbra held the
+converse opinion that priests were not to be browbeaten by a
+prince, and set themselves to make Affonso Henriques realize this
+to his bitter cost. They dispatched to Rome an account of his
+unconscionable, high-handed, incredible sacrilege, and invited
+Rome to administer condign spiritual flagellation upon this
+errant child of Mother Church. Rome made haste to vindicate her
+authority, and dispatched a legate to the recalcitrant, audacious
+boy who ruled in Portugal. But the distance being considerable,
+and means of travel inadequate and slow, it was not until Don
+Zuleyman had presided in the See of Coimbra for a full two months
+that the Papal Legate made his appearance in Affonso Henriques'
+capital.
+
+A very splendid Prince of the Church was Cardinal Corrado, the
+envoy dispatched by Pope Honorius II., full armed with apostolic
+weapons to reduce the rebellious Infante of Portugal into proper
+subjection.
+
+His approach was heralded by the voice of rumour. Affonso
+Henriques heard of it without perturbation. His conscience at
+ease in the absolution which he had wrung from Mother Church
+after his own fashion, he was entirely absorbed in preparations
+for a campaign against the Moors which was to widen his
+dominions. Therefore when at length the thunderbolt descended, it
+fell--so far as he was concerned--from a sky entirely clear.
+
+It was towards dusk of a summer evening when the legate, in a
+litter slung in line between two mules, entered Coimbra. He was
+attended by two nephews, Giannino and Pierluigi da Corrado, both
+patricians of Rome, and a little knot of servants. Empanoplied in
+his sacred office, the cardinal had no need of the protection of
+men-at-arms upon a journey through god-fearing lands.
+
+He was borne straight to the old Moorish palace where the Infante
+resided, and came upon him there amid a numerous company in the
+great pillared hall. Against a background of battle trophies,
+livid weapons, implements of war, and suits of mail both Saracen
+and Christian, with which the bare walls were hung, moved a
+gaily-clad, courtly gathering of nobles and their women-folk,
+when the great cardinal, clad from head to foot in scarlet,
+entered unannounced.
+
+Laughter rippled into silence. A hush descended upon the company,
+which stood now at gaze, considering the imposing and unbidden
+guest. Slowly the legate, followed by the two Roman youths,
+advanced down the hall, the soft pad of his slippered feet and
+the rustle of his silken robes being at first the only sound.
+On he came, until he stood before the shallow dais, where in a
+massively carved chair sat the Infante of Portugal, mistrustfully
+observing him. Affonso Henriques scented here an enemy, an ally
+of his mother's, the bearer of a fresh declaration of hostilities.
+Therefore of deliberate purpose he kept his seat, as if to stress
+the fact that here he was the master.
+
+"Lord Cardinal," he greeted the legate, "be welcome to my land of
+Portugal."
+
+The cardinal bowed stiffly, resentful of this reception. In his
+long journey across the Spains, princes and nobles had flocked to
+kiss his hand, and bend the knee before him, seeking his
+blessing. Yet this mere boy, beardless save for a silky down
+about his firm young cheeks, retained his seat and greeted him
+with no more submissiveness than if he had been the envoy of some
+temporal prince.
+
+"I am the representative of our Holy Father," he announced, in a
+voice of stern reproof. "I am from Rome, with these my well-
+beloved nephews."
+
+"From Rome?" quoth Affonso Henriques. For all his length of limb
+and massive thews he could be impish upon occasion. He was impish
+now. "Although no good has ever yet come to me from Rome, you
+make me hopeful. His Holiness will have heard of the preparations
+I am making for a war against the Infidel that shall carry the
+Cross where new stands the Crescent, and sends me perhaps, a gift
+of gold or assist me in this holy work."
+
+The mockery of it stung the legate sharply. His sallow, ascetic
+face empurpled.
+
+"It is not gold I bring you," he answered, "but a lesson in the
+faith which you would seem to have forgotten. I am come to teach
+you your Christian duty, and to require of you immediate
+reparation of the sacrilegious wrongs you have done. The Holy
+Father demands of you the instant re-instatement of the Bishop of
+Coimbra, whom you have driven out with threats of violence, and
+the degradation of the cleric you blasphemously appointed Bishop
+in his stead."
+
+"And is that all?" quoth the boy, in a voice dangerously quiet.
+
+"No." Fearless in his sense of right, the legate towered before
+him. "It is demanded of you further that you instantly release
+the lady, your mother, from the unjust confinement in which you
+hold her."
+
+"That confinement is not unjust, as all here can witness," the
+Infante answered. "Rome may believe it, because lies have been
+carried to Rome. Dona Theresa's life was a scandal, her regency
+an injustice to my people. She and the infamous Lord of Trava
+lighted the torch of civil war in these dominions. Learn here the
+truth, and carry it to Rome. Thus shall you do worthy service."
+
+But the prelate was obstinate and proud.
+
+"That is not the answer that our Holy Father awaits."
+
+"It is the answer that I send."
+
+"Rash, rebellious youth, beware!" The cardinal's anger flamed up,
+and his voice swelled. "I come armed with spiritual weapons of
+destruction. Do not abuse the patience of Mother Church, or you
+shall feel the full weight of her wrath released against you."
+
+Exasperated, Affonso Henriques bounded to his feet, his face
+livid now with passion, his eyes ablaze.
+
+"Out! Away!" he cried. "Go, my lord, and go quickly, or as God
+watches us I will add here and now yet another sacrilege to those
+of which you accuse me."
+
+The prelate gathered his ample robes about him. If pale, he was
+entirely calm once more. With stern dignity, he bowed to the
+angry youth, and so departed, but with such outward impassivity
+that it would have been difficult to say with whom lay the
+victory. If Affonso Henriques thought that night that he had
+conquered, morning was to shatter the illusion.
+
+He was awakened early by a chamberlain at the urgent instances of
+Emigio Moniz, who was demanding immediate audience. Affonso
+Henriques sat up in bed, and bade him to be admitted.
+
+The elderly knight and faithful counsellor came in, treading
+heavily. His swarthy face was overcast, his mouth set in stern
+lines under its grizzled beard.
+
+"God keep you, lord," was his greeting, so lugubriously delivered
+as to sound like a pious, but rather hopeless, wish.
+
+"And you, Emigio," answered him the Infante. "You are early
+astir. What is the cause?"
+
+"III tidings, lord." He crossed the room, unlatched and flung
+wide a window. "Listen," he bade the prince.
+
+On the still morning air arose a sound like the drone of some
+gigantic hive, or of the sea when the tide is making. Affonso
+Henriques recognized it for the murmur of the multitude.
+
+"What does it mean?" he asked, and thrust a sinewy leg from the
+bed.
+
+"It means that the Papal Legate has done all that he threatened,
+and something more. He has placed your city of Coimbra under a
+ban of excommunication. The churches are closed, and until the
+ban is lifted no priest Will be found to baptize, marry, shrive
+or perform any other Sacrament of Holy Church. The people are
+stricken with terror, knowing that they share the curse with you.
+They are massing below at the gates of the alcazar, demanding to
+see you that they may implore you to lift from them the horror of
+this excommunication."
+
+Affonso Henriques had come to his feet by now, and he stood there
+staring at the old knight, his face blenched, his stout heart
+clutched by fear of these impalpable, blasting weapons that were
+being used against him.
+
+"My God!" he groaned, and asked: "What must I do?"
+
+Moniz was preternaturally grave. "It is of the first importance
+that the people should be pacified."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"There is one way only--by a promise that you will submit to the
+will of the Holy Father, and by penance seek absolution for
+yourself and your city."
+
+A red flush swept into the young cheeks that had been so pale.
+
+"What?" he cried, his voice a roar. "Release my mother, depose
+Zuleyman, recall that fugitive recreant who cursed me, and humble
+myself to seek pardon at the hands of this insolent Italian
+cleric? May my bones rot, may I roast for ever in hell-fire if I
+show myself such a craven! And do you counsel it, Emigio--do you
+really counsel that?" He was in a towering rage.
+
+"Listen to that voice," Emigio answered him, and waved a hand to
+the open window. "How else will you silence it?"
+
+Affonso Henriques sat down on the edge of the bed, and took his
+head in his hands. He was checkmated--and yet....
+
+He rose and beat his hands together, summoning chamberlain and
+pages to help him dress and arm.
+
+"Where is the legate lodged?" he asked Moniz.
+
+"He is gone," the knight answered him. "He left at cock-crow,
+taking the road to Spain along the Mondego--so I learnt from the
+watch at the River Gate."
+
+"How came they to open for him?"
+
+"His office, lord, is a key that opens all doors at any hour of
+day or night. They dared not detain or delay him."
+
+"Ha!" grunted the Infante. "We will go after him, then." And he
+made haste to complete his dressing. Then he buckled on his great
+sword, and they departed.
+
+In the courtyard of the alcazar, he summoned Sancho Nunes and a
+half-dozen men-at-arms to attend him, mounted a charger and with
+Emigio Moniz at his side and the others following, he rode out
+across the draw-bridge into the open space that was thronged with
+the clamant inhabitants of the stricken city.
+
+A great cry went up when he showed himself--a mighty appeal to
+him for mercy and the remission of the curse. Then silence fell,
+a silence that invited him to answer and give comfort.
+
+He reined in his horse, and standing in his stirrups very tall
+and virile, he addressed them.
+
+"People of Coimbra," he announced, "I go to obtain this city's
+absolution from the ban that has been laid upon it. I shall
+return before sunset. Till then do you keep the peace."
+
+The voice of the multitude was raised again, this time to hail
+him as the father and protector of the Portuguese, and to invoke
+the blessing of Heaven upon his handsome head.
+
+Riding between Moniz and Nunes, and followed by his glittering
+men-at-arms, he crossed the city and took the road along the
+river by which it was known that the legate had departed. All
+that morning they rode briskly amain, the Infante fasting, as he
+had risen, yet unconscious of hunger and of all else but the
+purpose that was consuming him. He rode in utter silence, his
+face set, his brows stern; and Moniz, watching him furtively the
+while, wondered what thoughts were stirring in that rash,
+impetuous young brain, and was afraid.
+
+Towards noon at last they overtook the legate's party. They
+espied his mule-litter at the door of an inn in a little village
+some ten miles beyond the foothills of the Bussaco range. The
+Infante reined up sharply, a hoarse, fierce cry escaping him,
+akin to that of some creature of the wild when it espies its
+prey.
+
+Moniz put forth a hand to seize his arm.
+
+"My lord, my lord," he cried, fearfully. "What is your purpose?"
+
+The prince looked him between the eyes, and his lips curled in a
+smile that was not altogether sweet.
+
+"I am going to beg Cardinal Corrado to have compassion on me," he
+answered, subtly mocking, and on that he swung down from his
+horse, and tossed the reins to a man-at-arms.
+
+Into the inn he clanked, Moniz and Nunes following closely. He
+thrust aside the vinter who, not knowing him, would have hindered
+him, great lord though he seemed, from disturbing the holy guest
+who was honouring the house. He strode on, and into the room
+where the Cardinal with his noble nephews sat at dinner.
+
+At sight of him, fearing violence, Giannino and Pierluigi came
+instantly to their feet, their hands upon their daggers. But
+Cardinal da Corrado sat unmoved. He looked up, a smile of
+ineffable gentleness upon his ascetic face.
+
+"I had hoped that you would come after me, my son," he said. "If
+you come a penitent, then has my prayer been heard."
+
+"A penitent!" cried Affonso Henriques. He laughed wickedly, and
+plucked his dagger from its sheath.
+
+Sancho Nunes, in terror, set a detaining hand upon his prince's
+arm.
+
+"My lord," he cried in a voice that shook, "you will not strike
+the Lord's anointed--that were to destroy yourself for ever."
+
+"A curse," said Affonso Henriques, "perishes with him that
+uttered it." He could reason loosely, you see, this hot-blooded,
+impetuous young cutter of Gordian knots. "And it imports above
+all else that the curse should be lifted from my city of
+Coimbra."
+
+"It shall be, my son, as soon as you show penitence and a
+Christian submission to the Holy Father's will," said the
+undaunted Cardinal.
+
+"God give me patience with you," Affonso Henriques answered him.
+"Listen to me now, lord Cardinal." And he leaned forward on his
+dagger, burying the point of it some inches into the deal table.
+"That you should punish me with the weapons of the Faith for the
+sins that you allege against me I can understand and suffer.
+There is reason in that, perhaps. But will you tell me what
+reasons there can be in punishing a whole city for an offence
+which, if it exists at all, is mine alone?--and in punishing it
+by a curse so terrible that all the consolations of religion are
+denied those true children of Mother Church, that no priestly
+office may be performed within the city, that men and women may
+not approach the altars of the Faith, that they must die
+unshriven with their sins upon them, and so be damned through all
+eternity? Where is the reason that urges this?"
+
+The cardinal's smile had changed from one of benignity to one of
+guile.
+
+"Why, I will answer you. Out of their terror they will be moved
+to revolt against you, unless you relieve them of the ban. Thus,
+Lord Prince, I hold you in check. You make submission or else you
+are destroyed."
+
+Affonso Henriques considered him a moment. "You answer me
+indeed," said he, and then his voice swelled up in denunciation.
+"But this is statecraft, not religion. And when a prince has no
+statecraft to match that which is opposed to him, do you know
+what follows? He has recourse to force, Lord Cardinal. You compel
+me to it; upon your own head the consequences."
+
+The legate almost sneered. "What is the force of your poor lethal
+weapons compared with the spiritual power I wield? Do you
+threaten me with death? Do you think I fear it?" He rose in a
+surge of sudden wrath, and tore open his scarlet robe. "Strike
+here with your poniard. I wear no mail. Strike if you dare, and
+by the sacrilegious blow destroy yourself in this world and the
+next."
+
+The Infante considered him. Slowly he sheathed his dagger, smiling
+a little. Then he beat his hands together. His men-at-arms came
+in.
+
+"Seize me those two Roman whelps," he commanded, and pointed to
+Giannino and Pierlulgi. "Seize them, and make them fast. About
+it!"
+
+"Lord Prince!" cried the legate in a voice of appeal, wherein
+fear and anger trembled.
+
+It was the note of fear that heartened Affonso Henriques. "About
+it!" he cried again, though needlessly, for already his
+men-at-arms were at grips with the Cardinal's nephews. In a trice
+the kicking, biting, swearing pair were overpowered, deprived of
+arms, and pinioned. The men looked to their prince for further
+orders. In the background Moniz and Nunes witnessed all with
+troubled countenances, whilst the Cardinal, beyond the table,
+white to the lips, demanded in a quavering voice to know what
+violence was intended, implored the Infante to consider, and in
+the same breath threatened him with dread consequences of this
+affront.
+
+Affonso Henriques, unmoved, pointed through the window to a
+stalwart oak that stood before the inn.
+
+"Take them out there, and hang them unshriven," he commanded.
+
+The Cardinal swayed, and almost fell forward. He clutched the
+table, speechless with terror for those lads who were as the very
+apple of his eye, he who so fearlessly had bared his own breast
+to the steel.
+
+The two comely Italian youths were dragged out writhing in their
+captors' hands.
+
+At last the half-swooning legate found his voice. "Lord Prince,"
+he gasped. "Lord Prince . . . you cannot do this infamy! You
+cannot! I warn you that . . . that. . ." The threat perished
+unuttered, slain by mounting terror. "Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as
+you hope for mercy!"
+
+"What mercy do you practice, you who preach a gospe of mercy in
+the world, and cry for mercy now?" the Infante asked him.
+
+"But this is an infamy! What harm have those poor children done?
+What concern is it of theirs that I have offended you in
+performing my sacred duty?"
+
+Swift into that opening flashed the home-thrust of the Infante's
+answer.
+
+"What harm have my people of Coimbra done? What concern is it of
+theirs that I have offended you? Yet to master me you did not
+hesitate to strike at them with the spiritual weapons that are
+yours. To master you I do not hesitate to strike at your nephews
+with the lethal weapons that are mine. When you shall have seen
+them hang you will understand the things that argument could not
+make clear to you. In the vileness of my act you will see a
+reflection of the vileness of your own, and perhaps your heart
+will be touched, your monstrous pride abated."
+
+Outside, under the tree, the figures of the men-at-arms were
+moving. Expeditiously, and with indifference, they went about the
+preparations for the task entrusted to them.
+
+The Cardinal writhed, and fought for breath. "Lord Prince, this
+must not be!" He stretched forth supplicating hands. "Lord
+Prince, you must release my nephews."
+
+"Lord Cardinal, you must absolve my people."
+
+"If . . . if you will first make submission. My duty . . . to the
+Holy See . . . Oh God! Will nothing move you?"
+
+"When they have been hanged you will understand, and out of your
+own affliction learn compassion." The Infante's voice was so
+cold, his mien so resolute that the legate despaired of
+conquering his purpose. Abruptly he capitulated, even as the
+halters went about the necks of his two cherished lads.
+
+"Stop!" he screamed. "Bid them stop! The curse shall be lifted."
+
+Affonso Henriques opened the window with a leisureliness which to
+the legate seemed to belong to the realm of nightmare.
+
+"Wait yet a moment," the Infante called to those outside, about
+whom by now a little knot of awe-stricken villagers had gathered.
+Then he turned again to Cardinal Corrado, who had sunk to his
+chair like a man exhausted, and sat now panting, his elbows on
+the table, his head in his hands. "Here," said the prince, "are
+the terms upon which you may have their lives: Complete
+absolution, and Apostolic benediction for my people and myself
+this very night, I on my side making submission to the Holy
+Father's will to the extent of releasing my mother from duress,
+with the condition that she leaves Portugal at once and does not
+return. As for the banished bishop and his successor, matters
+must remain as they are; but you can satisfy your conscience on
+that score by yourself confirming the appointment of Don
+Zuleyman. Come, my lord, I am being generous, I think. In the
+enlargement of my mother I afford you the means of satisfying
+Rome. If you have learnt your lesson from what I here proposed,
+your conscience should satisfy you of the rest."
+
+"Be it so," the Cardinal answered hoarsely. "I will return with
+you to Coimbra and do your will."
+
+Thereupon, without any tinge of mockery, but in completest
+sincerity in token that the feud between them was now completely
+healed, Affonso Henriques went down upon his knees, like the true
+and humble son of Holy Church he accounted himself, to ask a
+blessing at the Cardinal's hands.
+
+
+
+
+
+II. THE FALSE DEMETRIUS
+
+Boris Godunov and the Pretended Son of Ivan the Terrible
+
+
+
+The news of it first reached him whilst he sat at supper in the
+great hall of his palace in the Kremlin. It came at a time when
+already there was enough to distract his mind; for although the
+table before him was spread and equipped as became an emperor's,
+the gaunt spectre of famine stalked outside in the streets of
+Moscow, and men and women were so reduced by it that cannibalism
+was alleged to be breaking out amongst them.
+
+Alone, save for the ministering pages, sat Boris Godunov under
+the iron lamps that made of the table, with its white napery and
+vessels of gold and silver plate, an island of light in the gloom
+of that vast apartment. The air was fragrant with the scent of
+burning pine, for although the time of year was May, the nights
+were chill, and a great log-fire was blazing on the distant
+hearth. To him, as he sat there, came his trusted Basmanov with
+those tidings which startled him at first, seeming to herald that
+at last the sword of Nemesis was swung above his sinful head.
+
+Basmanov, a flush tinting the prominent cheek-bones of his sallow
+face, an excited glitter in his long eyes, began by ordering the
+pages out of earshot, then leaning forward quickly muttered forth
+his news.
+
+At the first words of it, the Tsar's knife clashed into his
+golden platter, and his short, powerful hands clutched the carved
+arms of his great gilded chair. Quickly he controlled himself,
+and then as he continued to listen he was moved to scorn, and a
+faint smile began to stir under his grizzled beard.
+
+A man had appeared in Poland--such was the burden of Basmanov's
+story--coming none knew exactly whence, who claimed to be
+Demetrius, the son of Ivan Vassielivitch, and lawful Tsar of
+Russia--Demetrius, who was believed to have died at Uglich ten
+years ago, and whose remains lay buried in Moscow, in the Church
+of St. Michael. This man had found shelter in Lithuania, in the
+house of Prince Wisniowiecki, and thither the nobles of Poland
+were now flocking to do him homage, acknowledging him the son of
+Ivan the Terrible. He was said to be the living image of the dead
+Tsar, save that he was swarthy and black-haired, like the dowager
+Tsarina, and there were two warts on his face, such as it was
+remembered had disfigured the countenance of the boy Demetrius.
+
+Thus Basmanov, adding that he had dispatched a messenger into
+Lithuania to obtain more precise confirmation of the story. That
+messenger--chosen in consequence of something else that Basmanov
+had been told--was Smirnoy Otrepiev.
+
+The Tsar Boris sat back in his chair, his eyes on the gem
+encrusted goblet, the stem of which his fingers were mechanically
+turning. There was now no vestige of the smile on his round white
+face. It had grown set and thoughtful.
+
+"Find Prince Shuiski," he said presently, "and send him to me
+here."
+
+Upon the tale the boyar had brought him he offered now no
+comment.
+
+"We will talk of this again, Basmanov," was all he said in
+acknowledgment that he had heard, and in dismissal.
+
+But when the boyar had gone, Boris Godunov heaved himself to his
+feet, and strode over to the fire, his great head sunk between
+his massive shoulders. He was a short, thick-set, bow-legged man,
+inclining to corpulence. He set a foot, shod in red leather
+reversed with ermine, upon an andiron, and, leaning an elbow on
+the carved overmantel, rested his brow against his hand. His eyes
+stared into the very heart of the fire, as if they beheld there
+the pageant of the past, upon which his mind was bent.
+
+Nineteen years were sped since Ivan the Terrible had passed away,
+leaving two sons, Feodor Ivanovitch, who had succeeded him, and
+the infant Demetrius. Feodor, a weakling who was almost imbecile,
+had married Irene, the daughter of Boris Godunov, whereby it had
+fallen out that Boris became the real ruler of Russia, the power
+behind the throne. But his insatiable ambition coveted still
+more. He must wear the crown as well as wield the sceptre; and
+this could not be until the Ruric dynasty which had ruled Russia
+for nearly seven centuries should be stamped out. Between himself
+and the throne stood his daughter's husband and their child, and
+the boy Demetrius, who had been dispatched with his mother, the
+dowager Tsarina, to Uglich. The three must be removed.
+
+Boris began with the last, and sought at first to drive him out
+of the succession without bloodshed. He attempted to have him
+pronounced illegitimate, on the ground that he was the son of
+Ivan's seventh wife (the orthodox Church recognizing no wife as
+legitimate beyond the third). But in this he failed. The memory
+of the terrible Tsar, the fear of him, was still alive in
+superstitious Russia, and none dared to dishonour his son. So
+Boris had recourse to other and surer means. He dispatched his
+agents to Uglich, and presently there came thence a story that
+the boy, whilst playing with a knife, had been taken with a fit
+of epilepsy, and had fallen, running the blade into his throat.
+But it was not a story that could carry conviction to the
+Muscovites, since with it came the news that the town of Uglich
+had risen against the emissaries of Boris, charging them with the
+murder of the boy, and killing them out of hand.
+
+Terrible had been the vengeance which Boris had exacted. Of the
+luckless inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by
+his orders, and the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural
+Mountains, whilst the Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for
+having said that her boy was murdered at the instigation of
+Boris, was packed off to a convent, and had remained there ever
+since in close confinement.
+
+That had been in 1591. The next to go was Feodor's infant son,
+and lastly--in 1598--Feodor himself, succumbing to a mysterious
+illness, and leaving Boris a clear path to the throne. But he
+ascended it under the burden of his daughter's curse. Feodor's
+widow had boldly faced her father, boldly accused him of
+poisoning her husband to gratify his remorseless ambitions, and
+on a passionate appeal to God to let it be done by him as he had
+done by others she had departed to a convent, swearing never to
+set eyes upon him again.
+
+The thought of her was with him now, as he stood there looking
+into the heart of the fire; and perhaps it was the memory of her
+curse that turned his stout heart to water, and made him afraid
+where there could surely be no cause for fear. For five years now
+had he been Tsar of Russia, and in these five years he had taken
+such a grip of power as was not lightly to be loosened.
+
+Long he stood there, and there he was found by the magnificent
+Prince Shuiski, whom he had bidden Basmanov to summon.
+
+"You went to Uglich when the Tsarevitch Demetrius was slain,"
+said Boris. His voice and mien were calm and normal. "Yourself
+you saw the body. There is no possibility that you could have
+been mistaken in it?"
+
+"Mistaken?" The boyar was taken aback by the question. He was a
+tall man, considerably younger than Boris, who was in his
+fiftieth year. His face was lean and saturnine, and there was
+something sinister in the dark, close-set eyes under a single,
+heavy line of eyebrow.
+
+Boris explained his question, telling him what he had learnt from
+Basmanov. Basil Shuiski laughed. The story was an absurd one.
+Demetrius was dead. Himself he had held the body in his arms, and
+no mistake was possible.
+
+Despite himself, a sigh of relief fluttered from the lips of
+Boris. Shuiski was right. It was an absurd story, this. There was
+nothing to fear. He had been a fool to have trembled for a
+moment.
+
+Nevertheless, in the weeks that followed, he brooded more and
+more over all that Basmanov had said. It was in the thought that
+the nobility of Poland was flocking to the house of Wisniowiecki
+to do honour to this false son of Ivan the Terrible, that Boris
+found the chief cause of uneasiness. There was famine in Moscow,
+and empty bellies do not make for loyalty. Then, too, the
+Muscovite nobles did not love him. He had ruled too sternly, and
+had curbed their power. There were men like Basil Shuiski who
+knew too much--greedy, ambitious men, who might turn their
+knowledge to evil account. The moment might be propitious to the
+pretender, however false his claim. Therefore Boris dispatched a
+messenger to Wisniowiecki with the offer of a heavy bribe if he
+would yield up the person of this false Demetrius.
+
+But that messenger returned empty-handed. He had reached Bragin
+too late. The pretender had already left the place, and was
+safely lodged in the castle of George Mniszek, the Palatine of
+Sandomir, to whose daughter Maryna he was betrothed. If these
+were ill tidings for Boris, there were worse to follow soon.
+Within a few months he learned from Sandomir that Demetrius
+had removed to Cracow, and that there he had been publicly
+acknowledged by Sigismund III. of Poland as the son of Ivan
+Vassielivitch, the rightful heir to the crown of Russia. He
+heard, too, the story upon which this belief was founded.
+Demetrius had declared that one of the agents employed by Boris
+Godunov to procure his murder at Uglich had bribed his physician
+Simon to perform the deed. Simon had pretended to agree as the
+only means of saving him. He had dressed the son of a serf, who
+slightly resembled Demetrius, in garments similar to those worn
+by the young prince, and thereafter cut the lad's throat, leaving
+those who had found the body to presume it to be the prince's.
+Meanwhile, Demetrius himself had been concealed by the physician,
+and very shortly thereafter carried away from Uglich, to be
+placed in safety in a monastery, where he had been educated.
+
+Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the
+court of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich
+came forward now to identify with him the grown man, who carried
+in his face so strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That
+story which Boris now heard was soon heard by all Russia, and
+Boris realized that something must be done to refute it.
+
+But something more than assurances--his own assurances--were
+necessary if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last
+Boris bethought him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the
+murdered boy. He had her fetched to Moscow from her convent, and
+told her of this pretender who was setting up a claim to the
+throne of Russia, supported by the King of Poland.
+
+She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes
+and conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When
+he had done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so
+hard in these last twelve years since that day when her boy had
+been slain almost under her very eyes.
+
+"It is a circumstantial tale," she said. "It is perhaps true. It
+is probably true."
+
+"True!" He bounded from his seat. "True? What are you saying,
+woman? Yourself you saw the boy dead."
+
+"I did, and I know who killed him."
+
+"But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set
+the people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him."
+
+"Yes," she answered. And added the question: "What do you want of
+me now?"
+
+"What do I want?" He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated.
+Had the conventual confinement turned her head? "I want your
+testimony. I want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor
+that he is. The people will believe you."
+
+"You think they will?" Interest had kindled in her glance.
+
+"What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a
+mother know her own son?"
+
+"You forget. He was ten years of age then--a child. Now he is a
+grown man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be
+sure of anything?"
+
+He swore a full round oath at her. "Because you saw him dead."
+
+"Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of
+yours who killed him. Yet you made me swear--as the price of my
+brothers' lives--that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken
+than we thought. Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at
+all. Perhaps this man's tale is true."
+
+"Perhaps . . ." He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully,
+searchingly. "What do you mean?" he asked her sharply.
+
+Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that
+once had been so lovely. "I mean that if the devil came out of
+hell and called himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your
+undoing."
+
+Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon
+her wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His
+jaw dropped foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking
+eyes.
+
+"The people will believe me, you say--they will believe that a
+mother should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation
+numbered."
+
+If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he
+was forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the
+weapon with which she could destroy him. The result of it was
+that she went back to her convent under close guard, and was
+thereafter confined with greater rigour than hitherto.
+
+Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining
+ground in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be
+sceptical, but Boris knew that he could not trust them, since
+they had no cause to love him. He began perhaps to realize that
+it is not good to rule by fear.
+
+And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he
+had been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation
+of the rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the
+pretender's real identity.
+
+The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none
+other than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a
+monk, but, unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had
+abandoned himself to licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy
+had been chosen by Basmanov for this particular mission.
+
+The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor
+in proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to
+Sigismund III. to proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to
+demand his expulsion from the Kingdom of Poland; and his
+denunciation was supported by a solemn excommunication pronounced
+by the Patriarch of Moscow against the unfrocked monk, Grishka
+Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself Demetrius Ivanovitch.
+
+But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris
+expected. It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly,
+accomplished man, speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian,
+skilled in horsemanship and in the use of arms, and it was asked
+how an unfrocked monk had come by these accomplishments.
+Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had prevented the Tsarina
+Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives of revenge, he
+had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that,
+actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had
+prevented her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers
+Nagoy repaired to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their
+nephew, and to enrol themselves under his banner.
+
+Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The
+sword of Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out.
+Nothing remained him but to arm and go forth to meet the
+impostor, who was advancing upon Moscow with a great host of
+Poles and Cossacks.
+
+He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They,
+too, had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen
+him slain. Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was
+it possible that Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well
+as the Palatine of Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the
+adventurer, Prince Adam Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false
+Demetrius had first made his appearance, and all those Polish
+nobles who flocked to his banner? Or were they, too, moved by
+some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?
+
+That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time--in the
+winter of 1604--he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent
+them because, crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of
+leading them was denied him. He was forced to stay at home in the
+gloomy apartments of the Kremlin, fretted by care, with the
+ghosts of his evil past to keep him company, and assure him that
+the hour of judgment was at hand.
+
+With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to
+the adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he
+sent Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at
+Dobrinichi, and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which
+compelled him to fall back on Putioli. He lost all his infantry,
+and every Russian taken in arms on the pretender's side was
+remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.
+
+Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed
+and no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of
+the past gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then
+there was ever present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the
+pretender's identity. At last, one evening in April, he sent for
+Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again concerning that nephew of
+his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not good to be the
+uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great prince.
+
+Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white
+face was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had
+lost all its erstwhile firm vigour.
+
+"I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching
+this lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked
+monk, who claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that
+you have made no mistake--are you sure?"
+
+Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his
+mien. But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be
+mistaken. I am sure."
+
+Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His
+terrible eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the
+mental stage in which he mistrusted everything and everybody.
+
+"You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.
+
+"Highness, I swear . . ."
+
+"Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would
+Sigismund of Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you
+say? When I denounced him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev,
+would not Sigismund have verified the statement had it been
+true?"
+
+"The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius . . ."
+Otrepiev was beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.
+
+"Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after--long
+after--my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie.
+Will you stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until
+the rack pulls you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"
+
+"Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these
+years."
+
+"The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the
+whole truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your
+nephew."
+
+And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread.
+"He is not my nephew."
+
+"Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"
+
+Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon
+them before the irate Tsar.
+
+"I did not lie--not altogether. I told you a half-truth,
+Highness. His name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which
+he always has been known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I
+said, and the son of my brother's wife."
+
+"Then . . . then . . ." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he
+understood. "And his father?"
+
+"Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King
+Stephen's natural son."
+
+Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.
+
+"This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of
+course it is true. It is the light at last . . . at last. You may
+go."
+
+Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly.
+He could not know of how little account to Boris was the
+deception he had practiced in comparison with the truth he had
+now revealed, a truth that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon
+the dark mystery of the false Demetrius. The problem that so long
+had plagued the Tsar was solved at last.
+
+This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son
+of Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund
+of Poland and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the
+score of his identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading
+nobles of Poland, knew the man for what he was, and because of it
+supported him, using the fiction of his being Demetrius
+Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and facilitate the
+pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the object of
+it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and a
+Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already
+had sacrificed a throne--that of Sweden--to his devout conscience,
+and he saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not
+heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this
+Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim?
+What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why
+should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne
+of a country devoted to the Greek faith?
+
+At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of
+this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and
+Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an
+elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious
+son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the
+Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had
+fathered--if he had not invented--this fiction that the pretender
+was the dead Demetrius.
+
+Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from
+the first, what months of annoyance might he not have been
+spared; how easy it might have been to prick this bubble of
+imposture. But better late than never. To-morrow he would publish
+the true facts, and all the world should know the truth; and it
+was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this
+superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church,
+who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
+being baited for them.
+
+There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign
+envoys, and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had
+been for many a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was
+now to do, by the conviction that he held the false Demetrius in
+the hollow of his hand. There to those envoys he would announce
+to-night what to-morrow he would announce to all Russia--tell
+them of the discovery he had made, and reveal to his subjects the
+peril in which they stood. Towards the close of the banquet he
+rose to address his guests, announcing that he had an important
+communication for them. In silence they waited for him to speak.
+And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into
+his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face
+empurpling until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his
+mouth and nostrils.
+
+He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel
+and wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting
+aside of earthly vanities, and then he expired.
+
+It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His
+death was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is
+nothing in the manner of it to justify the opinion that it
+resulted from anything other than an apoplexy.
+
+His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow
+to place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this
+lad of sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the
+army, being now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious
+Shuiski, went over at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him
+Tsar of Russia. Thereafter events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched
+on Moscow, entered it in triumph, and again proclaimed Demetrius,
+whereupon the people rose in revolt against the son of the
+usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled the boy and his
+mother.
+
+Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his
+life at the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the
+Muscovites that the boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not
+that of Demetrius, but of a peasant's son, who had been murdered
+in his stead.
+
+That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's
+path, and he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet
+before he occupied it, he showed the real principles that
+actuated him, proved how true had been Boris's conclusion. He
+ordered the arrest and degradation of the Patriarch who had
+denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place appointed
+Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to the
+Roman communion.
+
+On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his
+triumphal entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before
+the tomb of Ivan the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina
+Maria, who, after a brief communion with him in private, came
+forth publicly to acknowledge him as her son.
+
+Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she
+purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had
+been a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was her proper
+due. After all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in
+addition to restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the
+hated Boris Godunov.
+
+His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing
+adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia,
+with Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at
+first all went well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure
+of popularity. If his swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his
+bearing was so courtly and gracious that he won his way quickly
+to the hearts of his people. For the rest he was of a tall,
+graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a knightly address at
+arms.
+
+But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to
+serve two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the
+orthodox Russians whose tsar he was, and on the other there were
+the Poles, who had made him so at a price, and who now demanded
+payment. Because he saw that this payment would be difficult and
+fraught with peril to himself he would--after the common wont of
+princes who have attained their objects--have repudiated the
+debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or at least to evade, the
+persistent reminders that reached him from the Papal Nuncio, to
+whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of the Roman
+faith.
+
+But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different
+terms. The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had
+reached him that Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had
+taken refuge in England, adding that he might be tempted to
+restore the fugitive to the throne of Muscovy.
+
+The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused
+Demetrius to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken,
+which were precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a
+beginning he granted the Jesuits permission to build a church
+within the sacred walls of the Kremlin, whereby he gave great
+scandal. Soon followed other signs that he was not a true son of
+the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by his indifference to
+public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs, and by
+surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he
+conferred high offices and dignities.
+
+And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling
+against him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they
+had been swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat
+Shuiski, who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he
+expected, who resented, above all, to see Basmanov--who had ever
+been his rival--invested with a power second only to that of the
+Tsar himself. Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his
+underground, burrowing fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who
+in their turn wrought upon the populace, and presently all was
+seething disaffection under a surface apparently calm.
+
+The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter
+of the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow,
+the bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and
+the feasting that followed found little favour in the eyes of the
+Muscovites, who now beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.
+
+The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May,
+1606. And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so
+skilfully laid. Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built
+before the walls of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had
+planned for the entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad
+that the fort was intended to serve as an engine of destruction,
+and that the martial spectacle was a pretence, the real object
+being that from the fort the Poles were to cast firebrands into
+the city, and then proceed to the slaughter of the inhabitants.
+
+No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated
+populace. They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May
+they stormed the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski
+himself, to the cry of "Death to the heretic! Death to the
+impostor!"
+
+They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the
+Tsar's bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword
+in hand to bar the way and give his master time to escape. The
+Tsar leapt from a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his
+leg, and lay there helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who
+presently discovered him.
+
+He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius
+Ivanovitch. nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked
+monk.
+
+It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the
+hands of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly
+he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument
+indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris
+Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his
+victims by personating one of them. In that personation he had
+haunted Boris as effectively as if he had been the very ghost of
+the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured, and finally
+broken him so that he died.
+
+That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme
+of human things. And that part being played, the rest mattered
+little. In the nature of him and of his position it was
+impossible that his imposture should be other than ephemeral.
+
+
+
+
+
+III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA
+
+An Eposode of the Inquisition in Seville
+
+
+
+Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in
+those early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the
+previous October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand
+and Isabella--had appointed the first inquisitors for Castile,
+ordering them to  set up a Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to
+deal with the apostatizing said to be rampant among the New-
+Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so large a proportion
+of the population.
+
+Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
+of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
+circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that
+they should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos
+and never be found beyond them after nightfall, and that they
+should not practice as doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or
+innkeepers. The desire to emancipate themselves from these and
+other restrictions upon their commerce with Christians and from
+the generally intolerable conditions of bondage and ignominy
+imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and embrace
+Christianity.
+
+But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions
+of faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought.
+Bitter racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never
+extinguished by their conversion.
+
+Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal,
+sinister pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded
+inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--
+headed by a Dominican bearing the white Cross, which invaded the
+city of Seville one day towards the end of December and took its
+way to the Convent of St. Paul, there to establish the Holy
+Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the New-Christians that
+they were to be the object of the attentions of this dread
+tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
+city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the
+Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of
+Arcos.
+
+This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed
+inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth
+that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons
+had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds
+of heretical pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of
+Castile that within fifteen days they should make an exact return
+of the persons of both sexes who had sought refuge in their
+lordships or jurisdictions; that they arrest all these and lodge
+them in the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating
+their property, and holding it at the disposal of the inquisitors;
+that none should shelter any fugitive under pain of greater
+excommunication and of other penalties by law established against
+abettors of heretics.
+
+The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women
+merely because they had departed from Seville before departure
+was in any way forbidden, revealed the severity with which the
+inquisitors intended to proceed. It completed the consternation
+of the New-Christians who had remained behind, and how numerous
+these were may be gathered from the fact that in the district of
+Seville alone they numbered a hundred thousand, many of them
+occupying, thanks to the industry and talent characteristic of
+their race, positions of great eminence. It even disquieted the
+well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all his vain,
+empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known
+perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a
+lineage that went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian
+blood, untainted by any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid
+alleged to flow in Hebrew veins. But it happened that he was in
+love with the daughter of the millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl
+whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was known throughout
+Seville and for many a mile around as la Hermosa Fembra; and he
+knew that such commerce--licit or illicitly conducted--was
+disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the girl had
+been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy
+fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It
+had been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast
+himself the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de
+Susan; it was exasperating to discover now a new and more
+imperative reason for this odious secrecy.
+
+Never sped a lover to his mistress in a frame of mind more
+aggrieved than that which afflicted Don Rodrigo as, tight-wrapped
+in his black cloak, he gained the Calle de Ataud on that January
+night.
+
+Anon, however, when by way of a garden gate and an easily
+escaladed balcony he found himself in the presence of Isabella,
+the delight of her effaced all other considerations. Her father
+was from home, as she had told him in the note that summoned him;
+he was away at Palacios on some merchant's errand, and would not
+return until the morrow. The servants were all abed, and so Don
+Rodrigo might put off his cloak and hat, and lounge at his ease
+upon the low Moorish divan, what time she waited upon him with a
+Saracen goblet filled with sweet wine of Malaga. The room in
+which she received him was one set apart for her own use, her
+bower, a long, low ceilinged chamber, furnished with luxury and
+taste. The walls were hung with tapestries, the floor spread with
+costly Eastern rugs; on an inlaid Moorish table a tall, three-
+beaked lamp of beaten copper charged with aromatic oil shed light
+and perfume through the apartment.
+
+Don Rodrigo sipped his wine, and his dark, hungry eyes followed
+her as she moved about him with vaguely voluptuous, almost feline
+grace. The wine, the heavy perfume of the lamp, and the beauty of
+her played havoc among them with his senses, so that he forgot
+for the moment his Castilian lineage and clean Christian blood,
+forgot that she derived from the accursed race of the Crucifiers.
+All that he remembered was that she was the loveliest woman in
+Seville, daughter to the wealthiest man, and in that hour of
+weakness he decided to convert into reality that which had
+hitherto been no more than an infamous presence. He would loyally
+fulfil the false, disloyal promises he had made. He would take
+her to wife. It was a sacrifice which her beauty and her wealth
+should make worth while. Upon that impulse he spoke now,
+abruptly:
+
+"Isabella, when will you marry me?"
+
+She stood before him, looking down into his weak, handsome face,
+her fingers interlacing his own. She merely smiled. The question
+did not greatly move her. Not knowing him for the scoundrel that
+he was, guessing nothing of the present perturbation of his
+senses, she found it very natural that he should ask her to
+appoint the day.
+
+"It is a question you must ask my father," she answered him.
+
+"I will," said he, "to-morrow, on his return." And he drew her
+down beside him.
+
+But that father was nearer than either of them dreamed. At that
+very moment the soft thud of the closing housedoor sounded
+through the house. It brought her sharply to her feet, and loose
+from his coiling arms, with quickened breath and blanching face.
+A moment she hung there, tense, then sped to the door of the
+room, set it ajar and listened.
+
+Up the stairs came the sound of footsteps and of muttering
+voices. It was her father, and others with him.
+
+With ever-mounting fear she turned to Don Rodrigo, and breathed
+the question: "If they should come here?"
+
+The Castilian stood where he had risen by the divan, his face
+paler now than its pale, aristocratic wont, his eyes reflecting
+the fear that glittered in her own. He had no delusion as to what
+action Diego de Susan would take upon discovering him. These
+Jewish dogs were quickly stirred to passion, and as jealous as
+their betters of the honour of their womenfolk. Already Don
+Rodrigo in imagination saw his clean red Christian blood
+bespattering that Hebrew floor, for he had no weapon save the
+heavy Toledo dagger at his girdle, and Diego de Susan was not
+alone.
+
+It was, he felt, a ridiculous position for a Hidalgo of Spain.
+But his dignity was to suffer still greater damage. In another
+moment she had bundled him into an alcove behind the arras at the
+chamber's end, a tiny closet that was no better than a cupboard
+contrived for the storing of household linen. She had-moved with
+a swift precision which at another time might have provoked his
+admiration, snatching up his cloak and hat, and other evidences
+of his presence, quenching the lamp, and dragging him to that
+place of cramped concealment, which she remained to share with
+him.
+
+Came presently movements in the room beyond, and the voice of her
+father:
+
+"We shall be securest from intrusion here. It is my daughter's
+room. If you will give me leave, I will go down again to admit
+our other friends."
+
+Those other friends, as Don Rodrigo gathered, continued to arrive
+for the next half-hour, until in the end there must have been
+some twenty of them assembled in that chamber. The mutter of
+voices had steadily increased, but so confused that no more than
+odd words, affording no clue to the reason of this gathering, had
+reached the hidden couple.
+
+And then quite suddenly a silence fell, and on that silence beat
+the sharp, clear voice of Diego de Susan addressing them.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I have called you hither that we may
+concert measures for the protection of ourselves and all New-
+Christians in Seville from the fresh peril by which we are
+menaced. The edict of the inquisitors reveals how much we have to
+fear. You may gather from it that the court of the Holy Office is
+hardly likely to deal in justice, and that the most innocent may
+find himself at any moment exposed to its cruel mercies.
+Therefore it is for us now to consider how to protect ourselves
+and our property from the unscrupulous activities of this
+tribunal. You are the principal New Christian citizens of
+Seville; you are wealthy, not only in property, but also in the
+goodwill of the people, who trust and respect, and at need will
+follow, you. If nothing less will serve, we must have recourse to
+arms; and so that we are resolute and united, my friends, we
+shall prevail against the inquisitors."
+
+Within the alcove, Don Rodrigo felt his skin roughening with
+horror at this speech, which breathed sedition not only against
+the Sovereigns, but against the very Church. And with his horror
+was blent a certain increase of fear. If his situation had been
+perilous before, it was tenfold more dangerous now. Discovery,
+since he had overheard this treason, must mean his certain death.
+And Isabella, realizing the same to the exclusion of all else,
+clutched his arm and cowered against him in the dark.
+
+There was worse to follow. Susan's address was received with a
+murmur of applause, and then others spoke, and several were
+named, and their presence thus disclosed. There was the
+influential Manuel Sauli, who next to Susan was the wealthiest
+man in Seville; there was Torralba, the Governor of Triana; Juan
+Abolafio, the farmer of the royal customs, and his brother
+Fernandez, the licentiate, and there were others--all of them men
+of substance, some even holding office under the Crown. Not one
+was there who dissented from anything that Susan had said; rather
+did each contribute some spur to the general resolve. In the end
+it was concerted that each of those present should engage himself
+to raise a proportion of the men, arms and money that would be
+needed for their enterprise. And upon that the meeting was
+dissolved, and they departed. Susan himself went with them. He
+had work to do in the common cause, he announced, and he would do
+it that very night in which it was supposed that he was absent at
+Palacios.
+
+At last, when all had gone, and the house was still again,
+Isabella and her lover crept forth from their concealment, and in
+the light of the lamp which Susan had left burning each looked
+into the other's white, startled face. So shaken was Don Rodrigo
+with horror of what he had overheard, and with the terror of
+discovery, that it was with difficulty he kept his teeth from
+chattering.
+
+"Heaven protect us!" he gasped. "What Judaizing was this?"
+
+"Judaizing!" she echoed. It was the term applied to apostacy, to
+the relapse of New-Christians to Judaism, an offense to be
+expiated at the stake. "Here was no Judaizing. Are you mad,
+Rodrigo? You heard no single word that sinned against the
+Faith."
+
+"Did I not? I heard treason enough to."
+
+"No, nor treason either. You heard honourable, upright men
+considering measures of defence against oppression, injustice,
+and evil acquisitiveness masquerading in the holy garments of
+religion."
+
+He stared askance at her for a moment, then his full lips curled
+into a sneer. "Of course you would seek to justify them," he said.
+"You are of that foul brood yourself. But you cannot think to
+cozen me, who am of clean Old-christian blood and a true son of
+Mother Church. These men plot evil against the Holy Inquisition.
+Is that not Judaizing when it is done by Jews?"
+
+She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from
+her great dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult.
+Yet still she sought to reason with him.
+
+"They are not Jews--not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in
+holy orders. All of them are Christians, and . . ."
+
+"Newly-baptized!" he broke in, sneering viciously. "A defilement
+of that holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is
+revealed by what passed here just now. Jews they were born, the
+sons of Jews, and Jews they remain under their cloak of mock
+Christianity, to be damned as Jews in the end." He was panting
+now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal inflamed this profligate
+defiler. "God forgive me that ever I entered here. Yet I do
+believe that it was His will that I should come to overhear what
+is being plotted. Let me depart from hence."
+
+With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the
+door. Her clutch upon his arm arrested him.
+
+"Whither do you go?" she asked trim sharply. He looked now into
+her eyes, and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw
+nothing of the hatred into which her love had been transmuted in
+that moment by his unsparing insults to herself, her race and her
+home, by the purpose which she clearly read in him.
+
+"Whither?" he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
+
+"Whither my Christian duty bids me."
+
+It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her
+purpose, she had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle,
+and armed with it stood between the door and him.
+
+"A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven
+watches us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must
+talk awhile before you go."
+
+Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine
+religious zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak
+woman's hand. Rapidly to-night was she coming into real knowledge
+of this Castilian gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for
+her lover. It was a knowledge that was to sear her presently with
+self-loathing and self-contempt. But for the moment her only
+consideration was that, as a direct result of her own wantonness,
+her father stood in mortal peril. If he should perish through the
+deletion of this creature, she would account herself his slayer.
+
+"You have not considered that the deletion you intend will
+destroy my father," she said quietly.
+
+"There is my Christian duty to consider," answered he, but
+without boldness now.
+
+"Perhaps. But there is something you must set against it. Have
+you no duty as a lover--no duty to me?"
+
+"No earthly duty can weigh against a spiritual obligation. . . ."
+
+"Ah, wait! Have patience. You have not well considered, that is
+plain. In coming here in secret you wronged my father. You will
+not trouble to deny it.
+
+"Jointly we wronged him, you and I. Will you then take advantage
+of something learnt whilst you were hiding there like a thief
+from the consequences of what you did, and so do him yet this
+further wrong?"
+
+"Must I wrong my conscience?" he asked her sullenly.
+
+"Indeed, I fear you must."
+
+"Imperil my immortal soul?" He almost laughed.
+
+"You talk in vain."
+
+"But I have something more than words for you." With her left
+hand she drew upon the fine gold chain about her neck, and
+brought forth a tiny jewelled cross. Passing the chain over her
+head, she held it out.
+
+"Take this," she bade him. "Take it, I say. Now, with that sacred
+symbol in your hand, make solemn oath to divulge no word of what
+you have learnt here tonight, or else resign yourself to an
+unshriven death. For either you take that oath, or I rouse the
+servants and have you dealt with as one who has intruded here
+unbidden for an evil end." She backed away from him as she spoke,
+and threw wide the door. Then, confronting him from the
+threshold, she admonished him again, her voice no louder than a
+whisper. "Quick now! Resolve yourself. Will you die here with
+all your sins upon you, and so destroy for all eternity the
+immortal soul that urges you to this betrayal, or will you take
+the oath that I require?"
+
+He began an argument that was like a sermon of the Faith. But she
+cut him short. "For the last time!"  she bade him. "Will you
+decide?"
+
+He chose the coward's part, of course, and did violence tomb fine
+conscience. With the cross in his hand he repeated after her the
+words of the formidable oath that she administered an oath which
+it must damn his immortal soul to break. Because of that, because
+she imagined that she had taken the measure of his faith, she
+returned him his dagger, and let him go at last. She imagined
+that she had bound him fast in irrefragable spiritual bonds.
+
+And even on the morrow, when her father and all those who had
+been present at that meeting at Susan's house were arrested by
+order of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, she still clung to
+that belief. Yet presently a doubt crept in, a doubt that she
+must at all costs resolve. And so presently she called for her
+litter, and had herself carried to the Convent of St. Paul, where
+she asked to see Frey Alonso de Ojeda, the Prior of the
+Dominicans of Seville.
+
+She was left to wait in a square, cheerless, dimly-lighted room
+pervaded by a musty smell, that had for only furniture a couple
+of chairs and a praying-stool, and for only ornament a great,
+gaunt crucifix hanging upon one of its whitewashed walls.
+
+Thither came presently two Dominican friars. One of these was a
+harsh-featured man of middle height and square build, the
+uncompromising zealot Ojeda. The other was tall and lean,
+stooping slightly at the shoulders, haggard and pale of
+countenance, with deep-set, luminous dark eyes, and a tender,
+wistful mouth. This was the Queen's confessor, Frey Tomas de
+Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor of Castile. He approached her,
+leaving Ojeda in the background, and stood a moment regarding her
+with eyes of infinite kindliness and compassion.
+
+"You are the daughter of that misguided man, Diego de Susan," he
+said, in a gentle voice. "God help and strengthen you, my child,
+against the trials that may be in store for you. What do you seek
+at our poor hands? Speak, child, without fear."
+
+"Father," she faltered, "I come to implore your pity."
+
+"No need to implore it, child. Should I withhold pity who stand
+myself in need of pity, being a sinner--as are we all."
+
+"It is for my father that I come to beg your mercy."
+
+"So I supposed." A shade crossed the gentle, wistful face; the
+tender melancholy deepened in the eyes that regarded her. "If
+your father is innocent of what has been alleged against him, the
+benign tribunal of the Holy Office will bring his innocence to
+light, and rejoice therein; if he is guilty, if he has strayed--
+as we may all stray unless fortified by heavenly grace--he shall
+be given the means of expiation, that his salvation may be
+assured him."
+
+She shivered at the words. She knew the mercy in which the
+inquisitors dealt, a mercy so spiritual that it took no account
+of the temporal agonies inflicted to ensure it.
+
+"My father is innocent of any sin against the Faith," said she.
+
+"Are you so sure?" croaked the harsh voice of Ojeda, breaking in.
+"Consider well. Remember that your duty as a Christian is above
+your duty as a daughter."
+
+Almost had she bluntly demanded the name of her father's accuser,
+that thus she might reach the object of her visit. Betimes she
+checked the rash impulse, perceiving that subtlety was here
+required; that a direct question would close the door to all
+information. Skilfully, then, she chose her line of attack.
+
+"I am sure," she exclaimed, "that he is a more fervent and pious
+Christian--New-Christian though he be--than his accuser."
+
+The wistfulness faded from Torquemada's eyes. They grew keen, as
+became the eyes of an inquisitor, the eyes of a sleuth, quick to
+fasten on a spoor. But he shook his head.
+
+Ojeda advanced. "That I cannot believe," said he. "The deletion
+was made from a sense of duty so pure that the delator did not
+hesitate to confess the sin of his own commission through which
+he had discovered the treachery of Don Diego and his associates."
+
+She could have cried out in anguish at this answer to her
+unspoken question. Yet she controlled herself, and that no single
+doubt should linger, she thrust boldly home.
+
+"He confessed it?" she cried, seemingly aghast. The friar slowly
+nodded. "Don Rodrigo confessed?" she insisted, as will the
+incredulous.
+
+Abruptly the friar nodded again; and as abruptly checked,
+recollecting himself.
+
+"Don Rodrigo?" he echoed, and asked: "Who mentioned Don Rodrigo?"
+
+But it was too late. His assenting nod had betrayed the truth,
+had confirmed her worst fear. She swayed a little; the room swam
+round her, she felt as she would swoon. Then blind indignation
+against that forsworn betrayer surged to revive her. If it was
+through her weakness and undutifulness that her father had been
+destroyed, through her strength should he be avenged, though in
+doing so she pulled down and destroyed herself.
+
+"And he confessed to his own sin?" she was repeating slowly, ever
+on that musing, incredulous note. "He dared confess himself a
+Judaizer?"
+
+"A Judaizer!" Sheer horror now overspread the friar's grim
+countenance. "A Judaizer! Don Rodrigo? Oh, impossible!"
+
+"But I thought you said he had confessed."
+
+"Why, yes, but . . . but not to that." Her pale lips smiled,
+sadly contemptuous.
+
+"I see. He set limits of prudence upon his confession. He left
+out his Judatting practices. He did not tell you, for instance,
+that this deletion was an act of revenge against me who refused
+to marry him, having discovered his unfaith, and fearing its
+consequences in this world and the next."
+
+Ojeda stared at her in sheer, incredulous amazement.
+
+And then Torquemada spoke: "Do you say that Don Rodrigo de
+Cardona is a Judaizer? Oh, it is unbelievable."
+
+"Yet I could give you evidence that should convince you."
+
+"Then so you shall. It is your sacred duty, lest you become an
+abettor of heresy, and yourself liable to the extreme penalty."
+
+It would be a half-hour later, perhaps, when she quitted the
+Convent of St. Paul to return home, with Hell in her heart,
+knowing in life no purpose but that of avenging the parent her
+folly had destroyed. As she was being carried past the Alcazar,
+she espied across the open space a tall, slim figure in black, in
+whom she recognized her lover, and straightway she sent the page
+who paced beside her litter to call him to her side. The summons
+surprised him after what had passed between them; moreover,
+considering her father's present condition, he was reluctant to
+be seen in attendance upon the beautiful, wealthy Isabella de
+Susan. Nevertheless, urged on by curiosity, he went.
+
+Her greeting increased his surprise.
+
+"I am in deep distress, Rodrigo, as you may judge," she told him
+sadly. "You will have heard what has befallen my father?"
+
+He looked at her sharply, yet saw nothing but loveliness rendered
+more appealing by sorrow. Clearly she did not suspect him of
+betrayal; did not realize that an oath extorted by violence--and
+an oath, moreover, to be false to a sacred duty--could not be
+accounted binding.
+
+"I . . . I heard of it an hour ago," he lied a thought
+unsteadily. "I . . . I commiserate you deeply."
+
+"I deserve commiseration," answered she, "and so does my poor
+father, and those others. It is plain that amongst those he
+trusted there was a traitor, a spy, who went straight from that
+meeting to inform against them. If I but had a list it were easy
+to discover the betrayer. One need but ascertain who is the one
+of all who were present whose arrest has been omitted." Her
+lovely sorrowful eyes turned full upon him. "What is to become
+of me now, alone in the world?" she asked him. "My father was
+my only friend."
+
+The subtle appeal of her did its work swiftly. Besides, he saw
+here a noble opportunity worth surely some little risk.
+
+"Your only friend?" he asked her thickly. "Was there no one else?
+Is there no one else, Isabella?"
+
+"There was," she said, and sighed heavily. "But after what befell
+last night, when . . . You know what is in my mind. I was
+distraught then, mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so
+that I could not even consider his sin in its full heinousness,
+nor see how righteous was your intent to inform against him. Yet
+I am thankful that it was not by your deletion that he was taken.
+The thought of that is to-day my only consolation."
+
+They had reached her house by now. Don Rodrigo put forth his arm
+to assist her to alight from her litter, and begged leave to
+accompany her within. But she denied him.
+
+"Not now--though I am grateful to you, Rodrigo. Soon, if you will
+come and comfort me, you may. I will send you word when I am more
+able to receive you--that is, if I am forgiven for . . ."
+
+"Not another word," he begged her. "I honour you for what you
+did. It is I who should sue to you for forgiveness."
+
+"You are very noble and generous, Don Rodrigo. God keep you!" And
+so she left him.
+
+She had found him--had she but known it--a dejected, miserable
+man in the act of reckoning up all that he had lost. In betraying
+Susan he had acted upon an impulse that sprang partly from rage,
+and partly from a sense of religious duty. In counting later the
+cost to himself, he cursed the folly of his rage, and began to
+wonder if such strict observance of religious duty was really
+worth while to a man who had his way to make in the world. In
+short, he was in the throes of reaction. But now, in her
+unsuspicion, he found his hopes revive. She need never know.
+The Holy Office preserved inviolate secrecy on the score of
+deletions--since to do otherwise might be to discourage delators--
+and there were no confrontations of accuser and accused, such as
+took place in temporal courts. Don Rodrigo left the Calle de
+Ataud better pleased with the world than he had been since
+morning.
+
+On the morrow he went openly to visit her; but he was denied, a
+servant announcing her indisposed. This fretted him, damped his
+hopes, and thereby increased his longing. But on the next day he
+received from her a letter which made him the most ample amends:
+
+"Rodrigo,--There is a matter on which we must come early to an
+understanding. Should my poor father be convicted of heresy and
+sentenced, it follows that his property will be confiscated,
+since as the daughter of a convicted heretic I may not inherit.
+For myself I care little; but I am concerned for you, Rodrigo,
+since if in spite of what has happened you would still wish to
+make me your wife, as you declared on Monday, it would be my wish
+to come to you well cowered. Now the inheritance which would be
+confiscated by the Holy Office from the daughter of a heretic
+might not be so confiscated from the wife of a gentleman of
+Castile. I say no more. Consider this well, and decide as your
+heart dictates. I shall receive you to-morrow if you come to me.
+
+"Isabella."
+
+She bade him consider well. But the matter really needed little
+consideration. Diego de Susan was sure to go to the fire. His
+fortune was estimated at ten million maravedis. That fortune, it
+seemed, Rodrigo was given the chance to make his own by marrying
+the beautiful Isabella at once, before sentence came to be passed
+upon her father. The Holy Office might impose a fine, but would
+not go further where the inheritance of a Castilian nobleman of
+clean lineage was concerned. He was swayed between admiration of
+her shrewdness and amazement at his own good fortune. Also his
+vanity was immensely flattered.
+
+He sent her three lines to protest his undying love, and his
+resolve to marry her upon the morrow, and went next day in
+person, as she had bidden him, to carry out the resolve.
+
+She received him in the mansion's best room, a noble chamber
+furnished with a richness such as no other house in Seville could
+have boasted. She had arrayed herself for the interview with an
+almost wanton cunning that should enhance her natural endowments.
+Her high-waisted gown, low-cut and close-fitting in the bodice,
+was of cloth of gold, edged with miniver at skirt and cuffs and
+neck. On her white bosom hung a priceless carcanet of limpid
+diamonds, and through the heavy tresses of her bronze-coloured
+hair was coiled a string of lustrous pearls. Never had Don
+Rodrigo found her more desirable; never had he felt so secure and
+glad in his possession of her. The quickening blood flushing now
+his olive face, he gathered her slim shapeliness into his arms,
+kissing her cheek, her lips, her neck.
+
+"My pearl, my beautiful, my wife!" he murmured, rapturously. Then
+added the impatient question: "The priest? Where is the priest
+that shall make us one?"
+
+Deep, unfathomable eyes looked up to meet his burning glance.
+Languorously she lay against his breast, and her red lips parted
+in a smile that maddened him.
+
+"You love me, Rodrigo--in spite of all?"
+
+"Love you!" It was a throbbing, strangled cry, an almost
+inarticulate ejaculation. "Better than life--better than
+salvation."
+
+She fetched a sigh, as of deep content, and nestled closer. "Oh,
+I am glad--so glad--that your love for me is truly strong. I am
+about to put it to the test, perhaps."
+
+He held her very close. "What is this test, beloved?"
+
+"It is that I want this marriage knot so tied that it shall be
+indissoluble save by death."
+
+"Why, so do I," quoth he, who had so much to gain.
+
+"And, therefore, because after all, though I profess
+Christianity, there is Jewish blood in my veins, I would have a
+marriage that must satisfy even my father when he regains his
+freedom, as I believe he will--for, after all, he is not charged
+with any sin against the faith."
+
+She paused, and he was conscious of a premonitory chill upon his
+ardour.
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked her, and his voice was strained.
+
+"I mean--you'll not be angry with me?--I mean that I would have
+us married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian
+manner, but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance
+with the Jewish rites."
+
+Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax
+their grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly.
+
+"Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me,
+you'll not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I
+am your wife you shall never hear anything again to remind you
+that I am of Jewish blood."
+
+His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and
+beads of sweat stood out upon his brow.
+
+"My God!" he groaned. "What do you ask? I . . . I can't. It were
+a desecration, a defilement."
+
+She thrust him from her in a passion. "You regard it so? You
+protest love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice
+all to you, you will not make this little sacrifice for my sake,
+you even insult the faith that was my forbears', if it is not
+wholly mine. I misjudged you, else I had not bidden you here to-
+day. I think you had better leave me."
+
+Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he
+sought to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her
+own. He ranted torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and
+aloof as earlier she had been warm and clinging. He had proved
+the measure of his love. He could go his ways.
+
+The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a
+desecration, a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of
+ten million maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not
+easily relinquished. There was enough cupidity in his nature,
+enough neediness in his condition, to make the realization of
+that dream worth the defilement of the abominable marriage rites
+upon which she insisted. But fear remained where Christian
+scruples were already half-effaced.
+
+"You do not realize," he cried. "If it were known that I so much
+as contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear
+proof of apostasy, and send me to the fire."
+
+"If that were your only objection it were easily overcome," she
+informed him coldly. "For who should ever inform against you?
+The Rabbi who is waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's
+sake betray us, and who else will ever know?"
+
+"You can be sure of that?"
+
+He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him
+in his turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier
+hesitation had begotten in her, until it was he who pleaded
+insistently for this Jewish marriage that filled him with such
+repugnance.
+
+And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers
+in which the conspirators had met.
+
+"Where is the Rabbi?" he asked impatiently, looking round that
+empty room.
+
+"I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him."
+
+"Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?"
+
+"No," she said. She stood apart, conning him steadily. "Yet I
+would not have it supposed that you were in any way coerced to
+this." They were odd words; but he heeded not their oddness. He
+was hardly master of the wits which in themselves were never of
+the brightest. "I require you to declare that it is your own
+desire that our marriage should be solemnized in accordance with
+the Jewish rites and the law of Moses."
+
+And he, fretted now by impatience, anxious to have this thing
+done and ended, made answer hastily:
+
+"Why, to be sure I do declare it to be my wish that we should be
+so married--in the Jewish manner, and in accordance with the law
+of Moses. And now, where is the Rabbi?" He caught a sound and saw
+a quiver in the tapestries that masked the door of the alcove.
+"Ah! He is here, I suppose...."
+
+He checked abruptly, and recoiled as from a blow, throwing up his
+hands in a convulsive gesture. The tapestry had been swept aside,
+and forth stepped not the Rabbi he expected, but a tall, gaunt
+man, stooping slightly at the shoulders, dressed in the white
+habit and black cloak of the order of St. Dominic, his face lost
+in the shadows  of a black cowl. Behind him stood two lay
+brothers of the order, two armed familiars of the Holy Office,
+displaying the white cross on their sable doublets.
+
+Terrified by that apparition, evoked, as it seemed, by those
+terribly damning words he had pronounced, Don Rodrigo stood
+blankly at gaze a moment, not even seeking to understand how this
+dread thing had come to pass.
+
+The friar pushed back his cowl, as he advanced, and displayed the
+tender, compassionate, infinitely wistful countenance of Frey
+Tomas de Torquemada. And infinitely compassionate and wistful
+came the voice of that deeply sincere and saintly man.
+
+"My son, I was told this of you--that you were a Judaizer--yet
+before I could bring myself to believe so incredible a thing in
+one of your lineage, I required the evidence of my own senses.
+Oh, my poor child, by what wicked counsels have you been led so
+far astray?" The sweet, tender eyes of the inquisitor were
+luminous with unshed tears. Sorrowing pity shook his gentle
+voice.
+
+And then Don Rodrigo's terror changed to wrath, and this
+exploded. He flung out an arm towards Isabella in passionate
+denunciation.
+
+"It was that woman who bewitched and fooled and seduced me into
+this. It was a trap she baited for my undoing."
+
+"It was, indeed. She had my consent to do so, to test the faith
+which I was told you lacked. Had your heart been free of
+heretical pravity the trap had never caught you; had your faith
+been strong, my son, you could not have been seduced from loyalty
+to your Redeemers"
+
+"Father! Hear me, I implore you!" He flung down upon his knees,
+and held out shaking, supplicating hands.
+
+"You shall be heard, my son. The Holy Office does not condemn any
+man unheard. But what hope can you put in protestations? I had
+been told that your life was disorderly and vain, and I grieved
+that it should be so, trembled for you when I heard how wide you
+opened the gates of your soul to evil. But remembering that age
+and reason will often make good and penitent amends for the
+follies of early life, I hoped and prayed for you. Yet that you
+should Judaize--that you should be bound in wedlock by the
+unclean ties of Judaism--Oh!" The melancholy voice broke off upon
+a sob, and Torquemada covered his pale face with his hands--long,
+white, emaciated, almost transparent hands. "Pray now, my child,
+for grace and strength," he exhorted. "Offer up the little
+temporal suffering that may yet be yours in atonement for your
+error, and so that your heart be truly contrite and penitent, you
+shall deserve salvation from that Divine Mercy which is
+boundless. You shall have my prayers, my son. I can do no more.
+Take him hence."
+
+On the 6th of February of that year 1481, Seville witnessed the
+first Auto de Fe, the sufferers being Diego de Susan, his fellow-
+conspirators, and Don Rodrigo de Cardona. The function presented
+but little of the ghastly pomp that was soon to distinguish these
+proceedings. But the essentials were already present.
+
+In a procession headed by a Dominican bearing aloft the green
+Cross of the Inquisition, swathed in a veil of crepe, behind whom
+walked two by two the members of the Confraternity of St. Peter
+the Martyr, the familiars of the Holy Office, came the condemned,
+candle in hand, barefoot, in the ignominious yellow penitential
+sack. Hemmed about by halberdiers, they were paraded through the
+streets to the Cathedral, where Mass was said and a sermon of the
+faith preached to them by the stern Ojeda. Thereafter they were
+conveyed beyond the city to the meadows of Tablada, where the
+stake and faggots awaited them.
+
+Thus the perjured accuser perished in the same holocaust with the
+accused. Thus was Isabella de Susan, known as la Hermosa Fembra,
+avenged by falseness upon the worthless lover who made her by
+falseness the instrument of her father's ruin.
+
+For herself, when all was over, she sought the refuge of a
+convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her
+no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an
+oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give.
+In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the
+doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of
+posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless,
+grinning skull of that once lovely head abode for close upon four
+hundred years. It was still to be seen there when Buonaparte's
+legions demolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE PASTRY-COOK OF MADRIGAL
+
+The Story of the False Sebastian of Portugal
+
+
+
+There is not in all that bitter tragi-comic record of human
+frailty which we call History a sadder story than this of the
+Princess Anne, the natural daughter of the splendid Don John of
+Austria, natural son of the Emperor Charles V. and, so, half-
+brother to the bowelless King Philip II. of Spain. Never was
+woman born to royal or semi-royal state who was more utterly the
+victim of the circumstances of her birth.
+
+Of the natural sons of princes something could be made, as
+witness the dazzling career of Anne's own father; but for natural
+daughters--and especially for one who, like herself, bore a
+double load of cadency--there was little use or hope. Their royal
+blood set them in a class apart; their bastardy denied them the
+worldly advantages of that  spurious eminence. Their royal blood
+prescribed that they must mate with princes; their bastardy
+raised obstacles to their doing so. Therefore, since the world
+would seem to hold no worthy place for them, it was expedient to
+withdraw them from the world before its vanities beglamoured
+them, and to immure them in convents, where they might aspire
+with confidence to the sterile dignity of abbesshood.
+
+Thus it befell with Anne. At the early age of six she had been
+sent to the Benedictine convent at Burgos, and in adolescence
+removed thence to the Monastery of Santa Maria la Real at
+Madrigal, where it was foreordained that she should take the
+veil. She went unwillingly. She had youth, and youth's hunger of
+life, and not even the repressive conditions in which she had
+been reared had succeeded in extinguishing her high spirit or in
+concealing from her the fact that she was beautiful. On the
+threshold of that convent which by her dread uncle's will was to
+be her living tomb, above whose gates her spirit may have beheld
+the inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate!" she
+made her protest, called upon the bishop who accompanied her to
+bear witness that she did not go of her own free will.
+
+But what she willed was a matter of no account. King Philip's
+was, under God's, the only will in Spain. Still, less perhaps to
+soften the sacrifice imposed upon her than because of what he
+accounted due to one of his own blood, his Catholic Majesty
+accorded her certain privileges unusual to members of religious
+communities: he granted her a little civil list--two ladies-in-
+waiting and two grooms--and conferred upon her the title of
+Excellency, which she still retained even when after her hurried
+novitiate of a single year she had taken the veil. She submitted
+where to have striven would have been to have spent herself in
+vain; but her resignation was only of the body, and this dejected
+body moved mechanically through the tasks and recreations that go
+to make up the grey monotone of conventual existence; in which
+one day is as another day, one hour as another hour; in which the
+seasons of the year lose their significance; in which time has no
+purpose save for its subdivision into periods devoted to sleeping
+and waking, to eating and fasting, to praying and contemplating,
+until life loses all purpose and object, and sterilizes itself
+into preparation for death.
+
+Though they might command and compel her body, her spirit
+remained unfettered in rebellion. Anon the claustral apathy might
+encompass her; in time and by slow degrees she might become
+absorbed into the grey spirit of the place. But that time was not
+yet. For the present she must nourish her caged and starving soul
+with memories of glimpses caught in passing of the bright,
+active, stirring world without; and where memory stopped she had
+now beside her a companion to regale her with tales of high
+adventure and romantic deeds and knightly feats, which served but
+to feed and swell her yearnings.
+
+This companion, Frey Miguel de Souza, was a Portuguese friar of
+the order of St. Augustine, a learned, courtly man who had moved
+in the great world and spoke with the authority of an eye-
+witness. And above all he loved to talk of that last romantic
+King of Portugal, with whom he had been intimate, that high-
+spirited, headstrong, gallant, fair-haired lad Sebastian, who at
+the age of four-and-twenty had led the disastrous overseas
+expedition against the Infidel, which had been shattered on the
+field of Alcacer-el-Kebir some fifteen years ago.
+
+He loved to paint for her in words the dazzling knightly pageants
+he had seen along the quays at Lisbon, when that expedition was
+embarking with crusader ardour, the files of Portuguese knights
+and men-at-arms, the array of German and Italian mercenaries, the
+young king in his bright armour, bare of head--an incarnation of
+St. Michael--moving forward exultantly amid flowers and
+acclamations to take ship for Africa. And she would listen with
+parted lips and glistening eyes, her slim body bending forward in
+her eagerness to miss no word of this great epic. Anon when he
+came to tell of that disastrous day of Alcacer-el-Kebir, her
+dark, eager eyes would fill with tears. His tale of it was hardly
+truthful. He did not say that military incompetence and a
+presumptuous vanity which would listen to no counsels had been
+the cause of a ruin that had engulfed the chivalry of Portugal,
+and finally the very kingdom itself. He represented the defeat as
+due to the overwhelming numbers of the Infidel, and dwelt at
+length upon the closing scene, told her in fullest detail how
+Sebastian had scornfully rejected the counsels of those who urged
+him to fly when all was lost, how the young king, who had fought
+with a lion-hearted courage, unwilling to survive the day's
+defeat, had turned and ridden back alone into the Saracen host to
+fight his last fight and find a knightly death. Thereafter he was
+seen no more.
+
+It was a tale she never tired of hearing, and it moved her more
+and more deeply each time she listened to it. She would ply him
+with questions touching this Sebastian, who had been her cousin,
+concerning his ways of life, his boyhood, and his enactments when
+he came to the crown of Portugal. And all that Frey Miguel de
+Souza told her served but to engrave more deeply upon her virgin
+mind the adorable image of the knightly king. Ever present in the
+daily thoughts of this ardent girl, his empanoplied figure
+haunted now her sleep, so real and vivid that her waking senses
+would dwell fondly upon the dream-figure as upon the memory of
+someone seen in actual life; likewise she treasured up the memory
+of the dream--words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten
+of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind
+not calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She
+was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a
+myth, a mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen
+years. She mourned him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily
+and nightly for the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation
+waited now almost impatiently for death that should unite her
+with him. Taking joy in the thought that she should go to him a
+maid, she ceased at last to resent the maidenhood that had been
+imposed upon her.
+
+One day a sudden, wild thought filled her with a strange
+excitement.
+
+"Is it so certain that he is dead?" she asked. "When all is said,
+none actually saw him die, and you tell me that the body
+surrendered by Mulai-Ahmed-ben-Mahomet was disfigured beyond
+recognition. Is it not possible that he may have survived?"
+
+The lean, swarthy face of Frey Miguel grew pensive. He did not
+impatiently scorn the suggestion as she had half-feared he would.
+
+"In Portugal," he answered slowly, "it is firmly believed that he
+lives, and that one day he will come, like another Redeemer, to
+deliver his country from the thrall of Spain."
+
+"Then . . . then . . ."
+
+Wistfully, he smiled. "A people will always believe what it
+wishes to believe."
+
+"But you, yourself?" she pressed him.
+
+He did not answer her at once. The cloud of thought deepened on
+his ascetic face. He half turned from her--they were standing in
+the shadow of the fretted cloisters--and his pensive eyes roamed
+over the wide quadrangle that was at once the convent garden and
+burial ground. Out there in the sunshine amid the hum of
+invisible but ubiquitously pulsating life, three nuns, young and
+vigorous, their arms bared to the elbows, the skirts of their
+black habits shortened by a cincture of rope, revealing feet
+roughly shod in wood, were at work with spade and mattock,
+digging their own graves in memento mori. Amid the shadows of the
+cloisters, within sight but beyond earshot, hovered Dona Maria de
+Grado and Dona Luiza Nieto, the two nobly-born nuns appointed by
+King Philip to an office as nearly akin to that of ladies-in-
+waiting as claustral conditions would permit.
+
+At length Frey Miguel seemed to resolve himself.
+
+"Since you ask me, why should I not tell you? When I was on my
+way to preach the funeral oration in the Cathedral at Lisbon, as
+befitted one who had been Don Sebastian's preacher, I was warned
+by a person of eminence to have a care of what I said of Don
+Sebastian, for not only was he alive, but he would be secretly
+present at the Requiem."
+
+He met her dilating glance, noted the quivering of her parted
+lips.
+
+"But that," he added, "was fifteen years ago, and since then I
+have had no sign. At first I thought it possible . . . there was
+a story afloat that might have been true . . . But fifteen
+years!" He sighed, and shook his head.
+
+"What . . . what was the story?" She was trembling from head to
+foot.
+
+"On the night after the battle three horsemen rode up to the
+gates of the fortified coast-town of Arzilla. When the timid
+guard refused to open to them, they announced that one of them
+was King Sebastian, and so won admittance. One of the three was
+wrapped in a cloak, his face concealed, and his two companions
+were observed to show him the deference due to royalty."
+
+"Why, then . . ." she was beginning.
+
+"Ah, but afterwards," he interrupted her, "afterwards, when all
+Portugal was thrown into commotion by that tale, it was denied
+that King Sebastian had been among these horsemen. It was
+affirmed to have been no more than a ruse of those men's to gain
+the shelter of the city."
+
+She questioned and cross-questioned him upon that, seeking to
+draw from him the admission that it was possible denial and
+explanation obeyed the wishes of the hidden prince.
+
+"Yes, it is possible," he admitted at length, "and it is believed
+by many to be the fact. Don Sebastian was as sensitive as high-
+spirited. The shame of his defeat may have hung so heavily upon
+him that he preferred to remain in hiding, and to sacrifice a
+throne of which he now felt himself unworthy. Half Portugal
+believes it so, and waits and hopes."
+
+When Frey Miguel parted from her that day, he took with him the
+clear conviction that not in all Portugal was there a soul who
+hoped more fervently than she that Don Sebastian lived, or
+yearned more passionately to acclaim him should he show himself.
+And that was much to think, for the yearning of Portugal was as
+the yearning of the slave for freedom.
+
+Sebastian's mother was King Philip's sister, whereby King Philip
+had claimed the succession, and taken possession of the throne of
+Portugal. Portugal writhed under the oppressive heel of that
+foreign rule, and Frey Miguel de Sousa himself, a deeply,
+passionately patriotic man, had been foremost among those who had
+sought to liberate her. When Don Antonio, the sometime Prior of
+Crato, Sebastian's natural cousin, and a bold, ambitious,
+enterprising man, had raised the standard of revolt, the friar
+had been the most active of all his coadjutators. In those days
+Frey Miguel, who was the Provincial of his order, a man widely
+renowned for his learning and experience of affairs, who had been
+preacher to Don Sebastian and confessor to Don Antonio, had
+wielded a vast influence in Portugal. That influence he had
+unstintingly exerted on behalf of the Pretender, to whom he was
+profoundly devoted. After Don Antonio's army had been defeated on
+land by the Duke of Alba, and his fleet shattered in the Azores
+in 1582 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Frey Miguel found himself
+deeply compromised by his active share in the rebellion. He was
+arrested and suffered a long imprisonment in Spain. In the end,
+because he expressed repentance, and because Philip II., aware of
+the man's gifts and worth, desired to attach him to himself by
+gratitude, he was enlarged, and appointed Vicar of Santa Maria la
+Real, where he was now become confessor, counsellor and confidant
+of the Princess Anne of Austria.
+
+But his gratitude to King Philip was not of a kind to change his
+nature, to extinguish his devotion to the Pretender, Don Antonio--
+who, restlessly ambitious, continued ceaselessly to plot abroad--
+or yet to abate the fervour of his patriotism. The dream of his
+life was ever the independence of Portugal, with a native prince
+upon the throne. And because of Anne's fervent hope, a hope that
+grew almost daily into conviction, that Sebastian had survived
+and would return one day to claim his kingdom, those two at
+Madrigal, in that quiet eddy of the great stream of life, were
+drawn more closely to each other.
+
+But as the years passed, and Anne's prayers remained unanswered
+and the deliverer did not come, her hopes began to fade again.
+Gradually she reverted to her earlier frame of mind in which all
+hopes were set upon a reunion with the unknown beloved in the
+world to come.
+
+One evening in the spring of 1594--four years after the name of
+Sebastian had first passed between the priest and the princess--
+Frey Miguel was walking down the main street of Madrigal, a
+village whose every inhabitant was known to him, when he came
+suddenly face to face with a stranger. A stranger would in any
+case have drawn his attention, but there was about this man
+something familiar to the friar, something that stirred in him
+vague memories of things long forgotten. His garb of shabby black
+was that of a common townsman, but there was something in his air
+and glance, his soldierly carriage, and the tilt of his bearded
+chin, that belied his garb. He bore upon his person the stamp of
+intrepidity and assurance.
+
+Both halted, each staring at the other, a faint smile on the lips
+of the stranger--who, in the fading light, might have been of any
+age from thirty to fifty--a puzzled frown upon the brow of the
+friar. Then the man swept off his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+"God save your paternity," was his greeting.
+
+"God save you, my son," replied Frey Miguel, still pondering him.
+"I seem to know you. Do I?"
+
+The stranger laughed. "Though all the world forget, your
+paternity should remember me"
+
+And then Frey Miguel sucked in his breath sharply. "My God!" he
+cried, and set a hand upon the fellow's shoulder, looking deeply
+into those bold, grey eyes. "What make you here?"
+
+"I am a pastry-cook."
+
+"A pastry-cook? You?"
+
+"One must live, and it is a more honest trade than most. I was in
+Valladolid, when I heard that your paternity was the Vicar of the
+Convent here, and so for the sake of old times--of happier times--
+I bethought me that I might claim your paternity's support." He
+spoke with a careless arrogance, half-tinged with mockery.
+
+"Assuredly . . ." began the priest, and then he checked. "Where
+is your shop?"
+
+"Just down the street. Will your paternity honour me?"
+
+Frey Miguel bowed, and together they departed.
+
+For three days thereafter the convent saw the friar only in the
+celebration of the Mass. But on the morning of the fourth, he
+went straight from the sacristy to the parlour, and, despite the
+early hour, desired to see her Excellency.
+
+"Lady," he told her, "I have great news; news that will rejoice
+your heart." She looked at him, and saw the feverish glitter in
+his sunken eyes, the hectic flush on his prominent cheek-bones.
+"Don Sebastian lives. I have seen him."
+
+A moment she stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she
+paled until her face became as white as the nun's coil upon her
+brow; her breath came in a faint moan, she stiffened, and swayed
+upon her feet, and caught at the back of a prie-dieu to steady
+and save herself from falling. He saw that he had blundered by
+his abruptness, that he had failed to gauge the full depth of her
+feelings for the Hidden Prince, and for a moment feared that she
+would swoon under the shock of the news he had so recklessly
+delivered.
+
+"What do you say? Oh, what do you say?" she moaned, her eyes
+half-closed.
+
+He repeated the news in more measured, careful terms, exerting
+all the magnetism of his will to sustain her reeling senses.
+Gradually she quelled the storm of her emotions.
+
+"And you say that you have seen him? Oh!" Once more the colour
+suffused her cheeks, and her eyes glowed, her expression became
+radiant. "Where is he?"
+
+"Here. Here in Madrigal."
+
+"In Madrigal?" She was all amazement. "But why in Madrigal?"
+
+"He was in Valladolid, and there heard that I--his sometime
+preacher and counsellor--was Vicar here at Santa Maria la Real.
+He came to seek me. He comes disguised, under the false name of
+Gabriel de Espinosa, and setting up as a pastry-cook until his
+term of penance shall be completed, and he shall be free to
+disclose himself once more to his impatiently awaiting people."
+
+It was bewildering, intoxicating news to her. It set her mind in
+turmoil, made of her soul a battle-ground for mad hope and
+dreadful fear. This dream-prince, who for four years had been the
+constant companion of her thoughts, whom her exalted, ardent,
+imaginative, starved Soul had come to love with a consuming
+passion, was a living reality near at hand, to be seen in the
+flesh by the eyes of her body. It was a thought that set her in
+an ecstasy of terror, so that she dared not ask Frey Miguel to
+bring Don Sebastian to her. But she plied him with questions, and
+so elicited from him a very circumstantial story.
+
+Sebastian, after his defeat and escape, had made a vow upon the
+Holy Sepulchre to lay aside the royal dignity of which he deemed
+that he had proved himself unworthy, and to do penance for the
+pride that had brought him down, by roaming the world in humble
+guise, earning his bread by the labour of his hands and the sweat
+of his brow like any common hind, until he should have purged his
+offense and rendered himself worthy once more to resume the
+estate to which he had been born.
+
+It was a tale that moved her pity to the point of tears. It
+exalted her hero even beyond the eminence he had already held in
+her fond dreams, particularly when to that general outline were
+added in the days that followed details of the wanderings and
+sufferings of the Hidden Prince. At last, some few weeks after
+that first startling announcement of his presence, in the early
+days of August of that year 1594, Frey Miguel proposed to her the
+thing she most desired, yet dared not beg.
+
+"I have told His Majesty of your attachment to his memory in all
+these years in which we thought him dead, and he is deeply
+touched. He desires your leave to come and prostrate himself at
+your feet."
+
+She crimsoned from brow to chin, then paled again; her bosom
+heaved in tumult. Between dread and yearning she spoke a faint
+consent.
+
+Next day he came, brought by Frey Miguel to the convent parlour,
+where her Excellency waited, her two attendant nuns discreetly in
+the background. Her eager, frightened eyes beheld a man of middle
+height, dignified of mien and carriage, dressed with extreme
+simplicity, yet without the shabbiness in which Frey Miguel had
+first discovered him.
+
+His hair was of a light brown--the colour to which the golden
+locks of the boy who had sailed for Africa some fifteen years ago
+might well have faded--his beard of an auburn tint, and his eyes
+were grey. His face was handsome, and save for the colour of his
+eyes and the high arch of his nose presented none of the
+distinguishing and marring features peculiar to the House of
+Austria, from which Don Sebastian derived through his mother.
+
+Hat in hand, he came forward, and went down on one knee before
+her.
+
+"I am here to receive your Excellency's commands," he said.
+
+She steadied her shuddering knees and trembling lips.
+
+"Are you Gabriel de Espinosa, who has come to Madrigal to set up
+as a pastry-cook?" she asked him.
+
+"To serve your Excellency."
+
+"Then be welcome, though I am sure that the trade you least
+understand is that of a pastry-cook."
+
+The kneeling man bowed his handsome head, and fetched a deep
+sigh.
+
+"If in the past I had better understood another trade, I should
+not now be reduced to following this one."
+
+She urged him now to rise, hereafter the entertainment between
+them was very brief on that first occasion. He departed upon a
+promise to come soon again, and the undertaking on her side to
+procure for his shop the patronage of the convent.
+
+Thereafter it became his custom to attend the morning Mass
+celebrated by Frey Miguel in the convent chapel--which was open
+to the public--and afterwards to seek the friar in the sacristy
+and accompany him thence to the convent parlour, where the
+Princess waited, usually with one or another of her attendant
+nuns. These daily interviews were brief at first, but gradually
+they lengthened until they came to consume the hours to dinner-
+time, and presently even that did not suffice, and Sebastian must
+come again later in the day.
+
+And as the interviews increased and lengthened, so they grew also
+in intimacy between the royal pair, and plans for Sebastian's
+future came to be discussed. She urged him to proclaim himself.
+His penance had been overlong already for what was really no
+fault at all, since it is the heart rather than the deed that
+Heaven judges, and his heart had been pure, his intention in
+making war upon the Infidel loftily pious. Diffidently he
+admitted that it might be so, but both he and Frey Miguel were of
+opinion that it would be wiser now to await the death of Philip
+II., which, considering his years and infirmities, could not be
+long delayed. Out of jealousy for his possessions, King Philip
+might oppose Sebastian's claims.
+
+Meanwhile these daily visits of Espinosa's, and the long hours he
+spent in Anne's company gave, as was inevitable, rise to scandal,
+within and without the convent. She was a nun professed,
+interdicted from seeing any man but her confessor other than
+through the parlour grating, and even then not at such length or
+with such constancy as this. The intimacy between them--fostered
+and furthered by Frey Miguel--had so ripened in a few weeks that
+Anne was justified in looking upon him as her saviour from the
+living tomb to which she had been condemned, in hoping that he
+would restore her to the life and liberty for which she had ever
+yearned by taking her to Queen when his time came to claim his
+own. What if she was a nun professed? Her profession had been
+against her will, preceded by only one year of novitiate, and she
+was still within the five probationary years prescribed.
+Therefore, in her view, her vows were revocable.
+
+But this was a matter beyond the general consideration or
+knowledge, and so the scandal grew. Within the convent there
+was none bold enough, considering Anne's royal rank, to offer
+remonstrance or advice, particularly too, considering that her
+behaviour had the sanction of Frey Miguel, the convent's
+spiritual adviser. But from without, from the Provincial of
+the Order of St. Augustine, came at last a letter to Anne,
+respectfully stern in tone, to inform her that the numerous
+visits she received from a pastry-cook were giving rise to talk,
+for which it would be wise to cease to give occasion. That
+recommendation scorched her proud, sensitive soul with shame. She
+sent her servant Roderos at once to fetch Frey Miguel, and placed
+the letter in his hands.
+
+The friar's dark eyes scanned it and grew troubled.
+
+"It was to have been feared," he said, and sighed.
+
+"There is but one remedy, lest worse follow and all be ruined.
+Don Sebastian must go."
+
+"Go?" Fear robbed her of breath. "Go where?"
+
+"Away from Madrigal--anywhere--and at once; tomorrow at latest."
+And then, seeing the look of horror in her face, "What else, what
+else?" he added, impatiently. "This meddlesome provincial may be
+stirring up trouble already."
+
+She fought down her emotion. "I . . . I shall see him before he
+goes?" she begged.
+
+"I don't know. It may not be wise. I must consider." He flung
+away in deepest perturbation, leaving her with a sense that life
+was slipping from her.
+
+That late September evening, as she sat stricken in her room,
+hoping against hope for at least another glimpse of him, Dona
+Maria de Grado brought word that Espinosa was even then in the
+convent in Frey Miguel's cell. Fearful lest he should be smuggled
+thence without her seeing him, And careless of the impropriety of
+the hour--it was already eight o'clock and dusk was falling--she
+at once dispatched Roderos to the friar, bidding him bring
+Espinosa to her in the parlour.
+
+The friar obeyed, and the lovers--they were no less by now--came
+face to face in anguish.
+
+"My lord, my lord," she cried, casting all prudence to the winds,
+"what is decided?"
+
+"That I leave in the morning," he answered.
+
+"To go where?" She was distraught.
+
+"Where?" He shrugged. "To Valladolid at first, and then . . .
+where God pleases."
+
+"And when shall I see you again?"
+
+"When . . . when God pleases."
+
+"Oh, I am terrified . . . if I should lose you  . . . if I should
+never see you more!" She was panting, distraught.
+
+"Nay, lady, nay," he answered. "I shall come for you when the
+time is ripe. I shall return by All Saints, or by Christmas at
+the latest, and I shall bring with me one who will avouch me."
+
+"What need any to avouch you to me?" she protested, on a note of
+fierceness. "We belong to each other, you and I. But you are free
+to roam the world, and I am caged here and helpless. . ."
+
+"Ah, but I shall free you soon, and we'll go hence together.
+See." He stepped to the table. There was an ink-horn, a box of
+pounce, some quills, and a sheaf of paper there. He took up a
+quill, and wrote with labour, for princes are notoriously poor
+scholars:
+
+"I, Don Sebastian, by the Grace of God King of Portugal, take to
+wife the most serene Dona ulna of Austria, daughter of the most
+serene Prince, Don John of Austria, by virtue of the disiensation
+which I hold from two pontiffs."
+
+And he signed it--after the manner of the Kings of Portugal in
+all ages--"El Rey"--the King.
+
+"Will that content you, lady?" he pleaded, handing it to her.
+
+"How shall this scrawl content me?"
+
+"It is a bond I shall redeem as soon as Heaven will permit."
+
+Thereafter she fell to weeping, and he to protesting, until Frey
+Miguel urged him to depart, as it grew late. And then she forgot
+her own grief, and became all solicitude for him, until naught
+would content her but she must empty into his hands her little
+store of treasure--a hundred ducats and such jewels as she
+possessed, including a gold watch set with diamonds and a ring
+bearing a cameo portrait of King Philip, and last of all a
+portrait of herself, of the size of a playing-card.
+
+At last, as ten was striking, he was hurried away. Frey Miguel
+had gone on his knees to him, and kissed his hand, what time he
+had passionately urged him not to linger; and then Sebastian had
+done the same by the Princess both weeping now. At last he was
+gone, and on the arm of Dona Maria de Grado the forlorn Anne
+staggered back to her cell to weep and pray.
+
+In the days that followed she moved, pale and listless, oppressed
+by her sense of loss and desolation, a desolation which at last
+she sought to mitigate by writing to him to Valladolid, whither
+he had repaired. Of all those letters only two survive.
+
+"My king and lord," she wrote in one of these, "alas! How we
+suffer by absence! I am so filled with the pain of it that if I
+did not seek the relief of writing to your Majesty and thus spend
+some moments in communion with you, there would be an end to me.
+What I feel to-day is what I feel every day when I recall the
+happy moments sodeliciously spent, which are no more. This
+privation is for me so severe a punishment of heaven that I
+should call it unjust, for without cause I find myself deprived
+of the happiness missed by me for so many years and purchased at
+the price of suffering and tears. Ah, my lord, how willingly,
+nevertheless, would I not suffer all over again the misfortunes
+that have crushed me if thus I might spare your Majesty the least
+of them. May He who rules the world grant my prayers and set a
+term to so great an unhappiness, and to the intolerable torment I
+suffer through being deprived of the presence of your Majesty. It
+were impossible for long to suffer so much pain and live.
+
+"I belong to you, my lord; you know it already. The troth I
+plighted to you I shall keep in life and in death, for death
+itself could not tear it from my soul, and this immortal soul
+will harbour it through eternity. . ."
+
+Thus and much more in the same manner wrote the niece of King
+Philip of Spain to Gabriel Espinosa, the pastry-cook, in his
+Valladolid retreat. How he filled his days we  do not know,
+beyond the fact that he moved freely abroad. For it was in the
+streets of that town that meddlesome Fate brought him face to
+face one day with Gregorio Gonzales, under whom Espinosa had been
+a scullion once in the service of the Count of Nyeba.
+
+Gregorio hailed him, staring round-eyed; for although Espinosa's
+garments were not in their first freshness they were far from
+being those of a plebeian.
+
+"In whose service may you be now?" quoth the intrigued Gregorio,
+so soon as greetings had passed between them.
+
+Espinosa shook off his momentary embarrassment, and took the hand
+of his sometime comrade. "Times are changed, friend Gregorio. I
+am not in anybody's service, rather do I require servants
+myself."
+
+"Why, what is your present situation?"
+
+Loftily Espinosa put him off. "No matter for that," he answered,
+with a dignity that forbade further questions. He gathered his
+cloak about him to proceed upon his way. "If there is anything
+you wish for I shall be happy, for old times' sake, to oblige
+you."
+
+But Gregorio was by no means disposed to part from him. We do not
+readily part from an old friend whom we rediscover in an
+unsuspected state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio.
+Gregorio's wife would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and
+to hear from his own lips of his improved and prosperous state.
+Gregorio would take no refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding
+to his insistence, went with him to the sordid quarter where
+Gregorio had his dwelling.
+
+About an unclean table of pine, in a squalid room, sat the
+three--Espinosa, Gregorio, and Gregorio's wife; but the latter
+displayed none of the signs of satisfaction at Espinosa's
+prosperity which Gregorio had promised. Perhaps Espinosa observed
+her evil envy, and it may have been to nourish it--which is the
+surest way to punish envy--that he made Gregorio a magnificent
+offer of employment.
+
+"Enter my service," said he, "and I will pay you fifty ducats
+down and four ducats a month."
+
+Obviously they were incredulous of his affluence. To convince
+them he displayed a gold watch--most rare possession--set with
+diamonds, a ring of price, and other costly jewels. The couple
+stared now with dazzled eyes.
+
+"But didn't you tell me when we were in Madrid together that you
+had been a pastry-cook at Ocana?" burst from Gregorio.
+
+Espinosa smiled. "How many kings and princes have been compelled
+to conceal themselves under disguises?" he asked oracularly. And
+seeing them stricken, he must play upon them further. Nothing, it
+seems, was sacred to him--not even the portrait of that lovely,
+desolate royal lady in her convent at Madrigal. Forth he plucked
+it, and thrust it to them across the stains of wine and oil that
+befouled their table.
+
+"Look at this beautiful lady, the most beautiful in Spain," he
+bade them. "A prince could not have a lovelier bride."
+
+"But she is dressed as a nun," the woman protested. "How, then,
+can she marry?"
+
+"For kings there are no laws," he told her with finality.
+
+At last he departed, but bidding Gregorio to think of the offer
+he had made him. He would come again for the cook's reply,
+leaving word meanwhile of where he was lodged.
+
+They deemed him mad, and were disposed to be derisive. Yet the
+woman's disbelief was quickened into malevolence by the jealous
+fear that what he had told them of himself might, after all, be
+true. Upon that malevolence she acted forthwith, lodging an
+information with Don Rodrigo de Santillan, the Alcalde of
+Valladolid.
+
+Very late that night Espinosa was roused from his sleep to find
+his room invaded by alguaziles--the police of the Alcalde. He was
+arrested and dragged before Don Rodrigo to give an account of
+himself and of certain objects of value found in his possession--
+more particularly of a ring, on the cameo of which was carved a
+portrait of King Philip.
+
+"I am Gabriel de Espinosa," he answered firmly, "a pastry-cook of
+Madrigal."
+
+"Then how come you by these jewels?"
+
+"They were given me by Dona Ana of Austria to sell for her
+account. That is the business that has brought me to Valladolid."
+
+"Is this Dona Ana's portrait?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"And this lock of hair? Is that also Dona Ana's? And do you,
+then, pretend that these were also given you to sell?"
+
+"Why else should they be given me?"
+
+Don Rodrigo wondered. They were useless things to steal, and as
+for the lock of hair, where should the fellow find a buyer for
+that? The Alcalde conned his man more closely, and noted that
+dignity of bearing, that calm assurance which usually is founded
+upon birth and worth. He sent him to wait in prison, what time he
+went to ransack the fellow's house in Madrigal.
+
+Don Rodrigo was prompt in acting; yet even so his prisoner
+mysteriously found means to send a warning that enabled Frey
+Miguel to forestall the Alcalde. Before Don Rodrigo's arrival,
+the friar had abstracted from Espinosa's house a box of papers
+which he reduced to ashes. Unfortunately Espinosa had been
+careless. Four letters not confided to the box were discovered by
+the alguaziles. Two of them were from Anne--one of which supplies
+the extract I have given; the other two from Frey Miguel himself.
+
+Those letters startled Don Rodrigo de Santillan. He was a shrewd
+reasoner and well-informed. He knew how the justice of Castile
+was kept on the alert by the persistent plottings of the
+Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio, sometime Prior of Crato. He
+was intimate with the past life of Frey Miguel, knew his self-
+sacrificing patriotism and passionate devotion to the cause of
+Don Antonio, remembered the firm dignity of his prisoner, and
+leapt at a justifiable conclusion. The man in his hands--the man
+whom the Princess Anne addressed in such passionate terms by the
+title of Majesty--was the Prior of Crato. He conceived that he
+had stumbled here upon something grave and dangerous. He ordered
+the arrest of Frey Miguel, and then proceeded to visit Dona Ana
+at the convent. His methods were crafty, and depended upon the
+effect of surprise. He opened the interview by holding up
+before her one of the letters he had found, asking her if she
+acknowledged it for her own.
+
+She stared a moment panic-stricken; then snatched it from his
+hands, tore it across, and would have torn again, but that he
+caught her wrists in a grip of iron to prevent her, with little
+regard in that moment for the blood royal in her veins. King
+Philip was a stern master, pitiless to blunderers, and Don
+Rodrigo knew he never would be forgiven did he suffer that
+precious letter to be destroyed.
+
+Overpowered in body and in spirit, she surrendered the fragments
+and confessed the letter her own.
+
+"What is the real name of this man, who calls himself a pastry-
+cook, and to whom you write in such terms as these?" quoth the
+magistrate.
+
+"He is Don Sebastian, King of Portugal." And to that declaration
+she added briefly the story of his escape from Alcacer-el-Kebir
+and subsequent penitential wanderings.
+
+Don Rodrigo departed, not knowing what to think or believe, but
+convinced that it was time he laid the whole matter before King
+Philip. His Catholic Majesty was deeply perturbed. He at once
+dispatched Don Juan de Llano, the Apostolic Commissary of the
+Holy Office to Madrigal to sift the matter, and ordered that Anne
+should be solitarily confined in her cell, and her nuns-in-
+waiting and servants placed under arrest.
+
+Espinosa, for greater security, was sent from Valladolid to the
+prison of Medina del Campo. He was taken thither in a coach with
+an escort of arquebusiers.
+
+"Why convey a poor pastry-cook with so much honour?" he asked his
+guards, half-mockingly.
+
+Within the coach he was accompanied by a soldier named Cervatos,
+a travelled man, who fell into talk with him, and discovered that
+he spoke both French and German fluently. But when Cervatos
+addressed him in Portuguese the prisoner seemed confused, and
+replied that although he had been in Portugal, he could not speak
+the language.
+
+Thereafter, throughout that winter, examinations of the three
+chief prisoners--Espinosa, Frey Miguel, and the Princess Anne--
+succeeded one another with a wearisome monotony of results. The
+Apostolic Commissary interrogated the princess and Frey Miguel;
+Don Rodrigo conducted the examinations of Espinosa. But nothing
+was elicited that took the matter forward or tended to dispel its
+mystery.
+
+The princess replied with a candour that became more and more
+tinged with indignation under the persistent and at times
+insulting interrogatories. She insisted that the prisoner was Don
+Sebastian, and wrote passionate letters to Espinosa, begging him
+for her honour's sake to proclaim himself what he really was,
+declaring to him that the time had come to cast off all disguise.
+
+Yet the prisoner, unmoved by these appeals, persisted that he was
+Gabriel de Espinosa, a pastry-cook. But the man's bearing, and
+the air of mystery cloaking him, seemed in themselves to belie
+that asseveration. That he could not be the Prior of Crato, Don
+Rodrigo had now assured himself. He fenced skilfully under
+exurnination, ever evading the magistrate's practiced point when
+it sought to pin him, and he was no less careful to say nothing
+that should incriminate either of the other two prisoners. He
+denied that he had ever given himself out to be Don Sebastian,
+though he admitted that Frey Miguel and the princess had
+persuaded themselves that he was that lost prince.
+
+He pleaded ignorance when asked who were his parents, stating
+that he had never known either of them--an answer this which
+would have fitted the case of Don Sebastian, who was born after
+his father's death, and quitted in early infancy by his mother.
+
+As for Frey Miguel, he stated boldly under examination the conviction
+that Don Sebastian had survived the African expedition, and the
+belief that Espinosa might well be the missing monarch. He
+protested that he had acted in good faith throughout, and without
+any thought of disloyalty to the King of Spain.
+
+Late one night, after he had been some three months in prison,
+Espinosa was roused from sleep by an unexpected visit from the
+Alcalde. At once he would have risen and dressed.
+
+"Nay," said Don Rodrigo, restraining him, "that is not necessary
+for what is intended."
+
+It was a dark phrase which the prisoner, sitting up in bed with
+tousled hair, and blinking in the light of the torches, instantly
+interpreted into a threat of torture. His face grew white.
+
+"It is impossible," he protested. "The King cannot have ordered
+what you suggest. His Majesty will take into account that I am a
+man of honour. He may require my death, but in an honourable
+manner, and not upon the rack. And as for its being used to make
+me speak, I have nothing to add to what I have said already."
+
+The stern, dark face of the Alcalde was overspread by a grim
+smile.
+
+"I would have you remark that you fall into contradictions.
+Sometimes you pretend to be of humble and lowly origin, and
+sometimes a person of honourable degree. To hear you at this
+moment one might suppose that to submit you to torture would be
+to outrage your dignity. What then . . ."
+
+Don Rodrigo broke off suddenly to stare, then snatched a torch
+from the hand of his alguaziles and held it close to the face of
+the prisoner, who cowered now, knowing full well what it was the
+Alcalde had detected. In that strong light Don Rodrigo saw that
+the prisoner's hair and beard had turned grey at the roots, and
+so received the last proof that he had to do with the basest of
+impostures. The fellow had been using dyes, the supply of which
+had been cut short by his imprisonment. Don Rodrigo departed
+well-satisfied with the results of that surprise visit.
+
+Thereafter Espinosa immediately shaved himself. But it was too
+late, and even so, before many weeks were past his hair had faded
+to its natural grey, and he presented the appearance of what in
+fact he was--a man of sixty, or thereabouts.
+
+Yet the torture to which he was presently submitted drew nothing from
+him that could explain all that yet remained obscure. It was from
+Frey Miguel, after a thousand prevarications and tergiversations,
+that the full truth--known to himself alone--was extracted by the
+rack.
+
+He confessed that, inspired by the love of country and the ardent
+desire to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke, he had never
+abandoned the hope of achieving this, and of placing Don Antonio,
+the Prior of Crato, on the throne of his ancestors. He had
+devised a plan, primarily inspired by the ardent nature of the
+Princess Anne and her impatience of the conventual life. It was
+while casting about for the chief instrument that he fortuitously
+met Espinosa in the streets of Madrigal. Espinosa had been a
+soldier, and had seen the world. During the war between Spain and
+Portugal he had served in the armies of King Philip, had
+befriended Frey Miguel when the friar's convent was on the point
+of being invaded by soldiery, and had rescued him from the peril
+of it. Thus they had become acquainted, and Frey Miguel had had
+an instance of the man's resource and courage. Further, he was of
+the height of Don Sebastian and of the build to which the king
+might have grown in the years that were sped, and he presented
+other superficial resemblances to the late king. The colour of
+his hair and beard could be corrected; and he might be made to
+play the part of the Hidden Prince for whose return Portugal was
+waiting so passionately and confidently. There had been other
+impostors aforetime, but they had lacked the endowments of
+Espinosa, and their origins could be traced without difficulty.
+In addition to these natural endowments, Espinosa should be
+avouched by Frey Miguel than whom nobody in the world was better
+qualified in such a matter--and by the niece of King Philip, to
+whom he would be married when he raised his standard. It was
+arranged that the three should go to Paris so soon as the
+arrangements were complete, where the Pretender would be
+accredited by the exiled friends of Don Antonio residing there--
+the Prior of Crato being a party to the plot. From France Frey
+Miguel would have worked in Portugal through his agents, and
+presently would have gone there himself to stir up a national
+movement in favour of a pretender so fully accredited. Thus he
+had every hope of restoring Portugal to her independence. Once
+this should have been accomplished, Don Antonio would appear in
+Lisbon, unmask the impostor, and himself assume the crown of the
+kingdom which had been forcibly and definitely wrenched from
+Spain.
+
+That was the crafty plan which the priest had laid with a
+singleness of aim and a detachment from minor considerations that
+never hesitated to sacrifice the princess, together with the
+chief instrument of the intrigue. Was the liberation of a
+kingdom, the deliverance of a nation from servitude, the
+happiness of a whole people, to weigh in the balance against the
+fates of a natural daughter of Don John of Austria and a soldier
+of fortune turned pastry-cook? Frey Miguel thought not, and his
+plot might well have succeeded but for the base strain in
+Espinosa and the man's overweening vanity, which had urged him to
+dazzle the Gonzales at Valladolid. That vanity sustained him to
+the end, which he suffered in October of 1595, a full year after
+his arrest. To the last he avoided admissions that should throw
+light upon his obscure identity and origin.
+
+"If it were known who I am . . ." he would say, and there break
+off.
+
+He was hanged, drawn and quartered, and he endured his fate with
+calm fortitude. Frey Miguel suffered in the same way with the
+like dignity, after having undergone degradation from his
+priestly dignity.
+
+As for the unfortunate Princess Anne, crushed under a load of
+shame and humiliation, she had gone to her punishment in the
+previous July. The Apostolic Commissary notified her of the
+sentence which King Philip had confirmed. She was to be
+transferred to another convent, there to undergo a term of four
+years' solitary confinement in her cell, and to fast on bread and
+water every Friday. She was pronounced incapable of ever holding
+any office, and was to be treated on the expiry of her term as an
+ordinary nun, her civil list abolished, her title of Excellency
+to be extinguished, together with all other honours and
+privileges conferred upon her by King Philip.
+
+The piteous letters of supplication that she addressed to the
+King, her uncle, still exist. But they left the cold, implacable
+Philip of Spain unmoved. Her only sin was that, yielding to the
+hunger of her starved heart, and chafingunder the ascetic life
+imposed upon her, she had allowed herself to be fascinated by the
+prospect of becoming the protectress of one whom she believed to
+be an unfortunate and romantic prince, and of exchanging her
+convent for a throne.
+
+Her punishment--poor soul--endured for close upon forty years,
+but the most terrible part of it was not that which lay within
+the prescription of King Philip, but that which arose from her
+own broken and humiliated spirit. She had been uplifted a moment
+by a glorious hope, to be cast down again into the blackest
+despair, to which a shame unspeakable and a tortured pride were
+added.
+
+Than hers, as I have said, there is in history no sadder story.
+
+
+
+
+
+V. THE END OF THE "VERT GALANT"
+
+The Assassination of Henry IV
+
+
+
+In the year 1609 died the last Duke of Cleves, and King Henry IV.
+of France and Navarre fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency.
+
+In their conjunction these two events were to influence the
+destinies of Europe. In themselves they were trivial enough,
+since it was as much a commonplace that an old gentleman should
+die as that Henry of Bearn should fall in love. Love had been the
+main relaxation of his otherwise strenuous life, and neither the
+advancing years--he was fifty-six at this date--nor the
+recriminations of Maria de' Medici, his long-suffering Florentine
+wife, sufficed to curb his zest.
+
+Possibly there may have been a husband more unfaithful than King
+Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous,
+his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny
+outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II.
+He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as
+Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by
+comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a
+seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high
+adventure, and knew how to be gallant in two senses.
+
+This gallantry of his is not, perhaps, seen to best advantage in
+the affair of Charlotte de Montmorency To begin with he was, as I
+have said, in his fifty-sixth year, an age at which it is
+difficult, without being ridiculous, to unbridle a passion for a
+girl of twenty. Unfortunately for him, Charlotte does not appear
+to have found him so. On the contrary, her lovely, empty head was
+so turned by the flattery of his addresses, that she came to
+reciprocate the passion she inspired.
+
+Her family had proposed to marry her to the gay and witty Marshal
+de Bassompierre; and although his heart was not at all engaged,
+the marshal found the match extremely suitable, and was willing
+enough, until the King declared himself. Henry used the most
+impudent frankness.
+
+"Bassompierre, I will speak to you as a friend," said he. "I am in
+love, and desperately in love, with Mademoiselle de Montmorency.
+If you should marry her I should hate you. If she should love me
+you would hate me. A breach of our friendship would desolate me,
+for I love you with sincere affection."
+
+That was enough for Bassompierre. He had no mind to go further
+with a marriage of convenience which in the sequel would most
+probably give him to choose between assuming the ridiculous role
+of a complacent husband and being involved in a feud with his
+prince. He said as much, and thanked the King for his frankness,
+whereupon Henry, liking him more than ever for his good sense,
+further opened his mind to him.
+
+"I am thinking of marrying her to my nephew, Conde. Thus I shall
+have her in my family to be the comfort of my old age, which is
+coming on. Conde, who thinks of nothing but hunting, shall have a
+hundred thousand livres a year with which to amuse himself."
+
+Bassompierre understood perfectly the kind of bargain that was in
+Henry's mind. As for the Prince de Conde, he appears to have been
+less acute, no doubt because his vision was dazzled by the
+prospect of a hundred thousand livres a year. So desperately poor
+was he that for half that sum he would have taken Lucifer's own
+daughter to wife, without stopping to consider the disadvantages
+it might entail.
+
+The marriage was quietly celebrated at Chantilly in February of
+1609. Trouble followed fast. Not only did Conde perceive at last
+precisely what was expected of him, and indignantly rebel against
+it, but the Queen, too, was carefully instructed in the matter by
+Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, the ambitious
+adventurers who had come from Florence in her train, and who saw
+in the King's weakness their own opportunity.
+
+The scandal that ensued was appalling. Never before had the
+relations between Henry and his queen been strained so nearly to
+breaking-point. And then, whilst the trouble of Henry's own
+making was growing about him until it threatened to overwhelm
+him, he received a letter from Vaucelas, his ambassador at
+Madrid, containing revelations that changed his annoyance into
+stark apprehension.
+
+When the last Duke of Cleves died a few months before, "leaving
+all the world his heirs"--to use Henry's own phrase--the Emperor
+had stepped in, and over-riding the rights of certain German
+princes had bestowed the fief upon his own nephew, the Archduke
+Leopold. Now this was an arrangement that did not suit Henry's
+policy at all, and being then--as the result of a wise husbanding
+of resources--the most powerful prince in Europe, Henry was not
+likely to submit tamely to arrangements that did not suit him.
+His instructions to Vaucelas were to keep open the difference
+between France and the House of Austria arising out of this
+matter of Cleves. All Europe knew that Henry desired to marry the
+Dauphin to the heiress of Lorraine, so that this State might one
+day be united with France; and it was partly to support this
+claim that he was now disposed to attach the German princes to
+his interests.
+
+Yet what Vaucelas told him in that letter was that certain agents
+at the court of Spain, chief among whom was the Florentine
+ambassador, acting upon instructions from certain members of the
+household of the Queen of France, and from others whom Vaucelas
+said he dared not mention, were intriguing to blast Henry's
+designs against the house of Austria, and to bring him willy-
+nilly into a union with Spain. These agents had gone so far in
+their utter disregard of Henry's own intentions as to propose to
+the Council of Madrid that the alliance should be cemented by a
+marriage between the Dauphin and the Infanta.
+
+That letter sent Henry early one morning hot-foot to the Arsenal,
+where Sully, his Minister of State, had his residence. Maximilien
+de Bethune, Duke of Sully, was not merely the King's servant, he
+was his closest friend, the very keeper of his soul; and the King
+leaned upon him and sought his guidance not only in State affairs,
+but in the most intimate and domestic matters. Often already had
+it fallen to Sully to patch up the differences created between
+husband and wife by Henry's persistent infidelities.
+
+The King, arriving like the whirlwind, turned everybody out of
+the closet in which the duke--but newly risen--received him in
+bed-gown and night-cap. Alone with his minister, Henry came
+abruptly to the matter.
+
+"You have heard what is being said of me?" he burst out. He stood
+with his back to the window, a sturdy, erect, soldierly figure, a
+little above the middle height, dressed like a captain of fortune
+in jerkin and long boots of grey leather, and a grey hat with a
+wine-coloured ostrich plume. His countenance matched his raiment.
+Keeneyed, broad of brow, with a high-bridged, pendulous nose, red
+lips, a tuft of beard and a pair of grizzled, bristling
+moustachios, he looked half-hero, half-satyr; half-Captain, half-
+Polichinelle.
+
+Sully, tall and broad, the incarnation of respectability and
+dignity, despite bed-gown and slippers and the nightcap covering
+his high, bald crown, made no presence of misunderstanding him.
+
+"Of you and the Princesse de Conde, you mean, sire?" quoth he,
+and gravely he shook his head. "It is a matter that has filled me
+with apprehension, for I foresee from it far greater trouble than
+from any former attachment of yours."
+
+"So they have convinced you, too, Grand-Master?" Henry's tone was
+almost sorrowful. "Yet I swear that all is greatly exaggerated.
+It is the work of that dog Concini. Ventre St. Gris! If he has no
+respect for me, at least he might consider how he slanders a
+child of such grace and wit and beauty, a lady of her high birth
+and noble lineage."
+
+There was a dangerous quiver of emotion in his voice that was not
+missed by the keen ears of Sully. Henry moved from the window,
+and flung into a chair.
+
+"Concini works to enrage the Queen against me, and to drive her
+to take violent resolutions which might give colour to their
+pernicious designs."
+
+"Sire!" It was a cry of protest from Sully.
+
+Henry laughed grimly at his minister's incredulity, and plucked
+forth the letter from Vaucelas.
+
+"Read that."
+
+Sully read, and, aghast at what the letter told him, ejaculated:
+"They must be mad!"
+
+"Oh, no," said the King. "They are not mad. They are most wickedly
+sane, which is why their designs fill me with apprehension. What
+do you infer, Grand-Master, from such deliberate plots against
+resolutions from which they know that nothing can turn me while
+I have life?"
+
+"What can I infer?" quoth Sully, aghast.
+
+"In acting thus--in daring to act thus," the King expounded,
+"they proceed as if they knew that I can have but a short time to
+live."
+
+"Sire!"
+
+"What else? They plan events which cannot take place until I am
+dead."
+
+Sully stared at his master for a long moment, in stupefied
+silence, his loyal Huguenot soul refusing to discount by flattery
+the truth that he perceived.
+
+"Sire," he said at last, bowing his fine head, "you must take
+your measures."
+
+"Ay, but against whom? Who are these that Vaucelas says he dare
+not name? Can you suggest another than . . ." He paused,
+shrinking in horror from completing the utterance of his thought.
+Then, with an abrupt gesture, he went on, ". . . than the Queen
+herself?"
+
+Sully quietly placed the letter on the table, and sat down. He
+took his chin in his hand and looked squarely across at Henry.
+
+"Sire, you have brought this upon yourself. You have  exasperated
+her Majesty; you have driven her in despair to seek and act upon
+the councils of this scoundrel Concini. There never was an
+attachment of yours that did not beget trouble with the Queen,
+but never such trouble as I have been foreseeing from your
+attachment to the Princess of Conde. Sire, will you not consider
+where you stand?"
+
+"They are lies, I tell you," Henry stormed. But Sully the
+uncompromising gravely shook his head. "At least," Henry amended,
+"they are gross exaggerations. Oh, I confess to you, my friend,
+that I am sick with love of her. Day and night I see nothing but
+her gracious image. I sigh and fret and fume like any callow lad
+of twenty. I suffer the tortures of the damned. And yet . . . and
+yet, I swear to you, Sully, that I will curb this passion though
+it kill me. I will stifle these fires, though they consume my
+soul to ashes. No harm shall come to her from me. No harm has
+come yet. I swear it. These stories that are put about are the
+inventions of Concini to set my wife against me. Do you know how
+far he and his wife have dared to go? They have persuaded the
+Queen to eat nothing that is not prepared in the kitchen they
+have set up for her in their own apartments. What can you
+conclude from that but that they suggest that I desire to poison
+her?"
+
+"Why suffer it, sire?" quoth Sully gravely. "Send the pair
+packing back to Florence, and so be rid of them."
+
+Henry rose in agitation. "I have a mind to. Ventre St. Gris! I
+have a mind to. Yes, it is the only thing. You can manage it,
+Sully. Disabuse her mind of her Suspicions regarding the Princess
+of Conde; make my peace with her; convince her of my sincerity,
+of my firm intention to have done with gallantry, so that she on
+her side will make me the sacrifice of banishing the Concinis.
+You will do this, my friend?"
+
+It was no less than Sully had been expecting from past
+experience, and the task was one in which he was by now well-
+practiced; but the situation had never before been quite so
+difficult. He rose.
+
+"Why, surely, sire," said he. "But her Majesty on her side may
+require something more to reconcile her to the sacrifice. She may
+reopen the question of her coronation so long and--in her view--
+so unreasonably postponed."
+
+Henry's face grew overcast, his brows knit. "I have always had an
+instinct against it, as you know, Grand Master," said he, "and
+this instinct is strengthened by what that letter has taught me.
+If she will dare so much, having so little real power, what might
+she not do if . . ." He broke off, and fell to musing. "If she
+demands it we must yield, I suppose," he said at length. "But
+give her to understand that if I discover any more of her designs
+with Spain I shall be provoked to the last degree against her.
+And as an antidote to these machinations at Madrid you may
+publish my intention to uphold the claims of the German Princes
+in the matter of Cleves, and let all the world know that we are
+arming to that end."
+
+He may have thought--as was long afterwards alleged--that the
+threat itself should be sufficient, for there was at that time no
+power in Europe that could have stood against his armies in the
+field.
+
+On that they parted, with a final injunction from Sully that
+Henry should see the Princesse de Conde no more.
+
+"I swear to you, Grand Master, that I will use restraint and
+respect the sacred tie I formed between my nephew and Charlotte
+solely so that I might impose silence upon my own passion."
+
+And the good Sully writes in comment upon this: "I should have
+relied absolutely upon these assurances had I not known how easy
+it is for a heart tender and passionate as was his to deceive
+itself"--which is the most amiable conceivable way of saying that
+he attached not the slightest faith to the King's promise.
+
+Nevertheless he went about the task of making the peace between
+the royal couple with all the skill and tact that experience had
+taught him; and he might have driven a good bargain on his
+master's behalf but for his master's own weakness in supporting
+him. Maria de' Medici would not hear of the banishment of the
+Concinis, to whom she was so deeply attached. She insisted with
+perfect justice that she was a bitterly injured woman, and
+refused to entertain any idea of reconciliation save with the
+condition that arrangements for her coronation as Queen of
+France--which was no more than her due--should be made at once,
+and that the King should give an undertaking not to make himself
+ridiculous any longer by his pursuit of the Princess of Conde. Of
+the matters contained in the letter of Vaucelas she denied all
+knowledge, nor would suffer any further inquisition.
+
+From Henry's point of view this was anything but satisfactory.
+But he yielded. Conscience made a coward of him. He had wronged
+her so much in one way that he must make some compensating
+concessions to her in another. This weakness was part of his
+mental attitude towards her, which swung constantly between
+confidence and diffidence, esteem and indifference, affection and
+coldness; at times he inclined to put her from him entirely; at
+others he opined that no one on his Council was more capable of
+the administration of affairs. Even in the indignation aroused
+by the proof he held of her disloyalty, he was too just not to
+admit the provocation he had given her. So he submitted to a
+reconciliation on her own terms, and pledged himself to renounce
+Charlotte. We have no right to assume from the sequel that he was
+not sincere in the intention.
+
+By the following May events proved the accuracy of Sully's
+judgment. The court was at Fontainebleau when the last bulwark of
+Henry's prudence was battered down by the vanity of that lovely
+fool, Charlotte, who must be encouraging her royal lover to
+resume his flattering homage. But both appear to have reckoned
+without the lady's husband.
+
+Henry presented Charlotte with jewels to the value of  eighteen
+thousand livres, purchased from Messier, the jeweller of the Pont
+au Change; and you conceive what the charitable ladies of the
+Court had to say about it. At the first hint of scandal Monsieur
+de Conde put himself into a fine heat, and said things which
+pained and annoyed the King exceedingly. Henry had amassed a
+considerable and varied experience of jealous husbands in his
+time; but he had never met one quite so intolerable as this
+nephew of his. He complained of it in a letter to Sully.
+
+"My friend,--Monsieur the Prince is here, but he acts like a man
+possessed. You will be angry and ashamed at the things he says of
+me. I shall end by losing all patience with him. In the meanwhile
+I am obliged to taut to him with severity."
+
+More severe than any talk was Henry's instruction to Sully to
+withhold payment of the last quarter of the prince's allowance,
+and to give refusals to his creditors and purveyors. Thus he
+intended also, no doubt, to make it clear to Conde that he did
+not receive a pension of a hundred thousand livres a year for
+nothing.
+
+"If this does not keep him in bounds," Henry concluded, "we must
+think of some other method, for he says the most injurious things
+of me."
+
+So little did it keep the prince in bounds--as Henry understood
+the phrase--that he immediately packed his belongings, and
+carried his wife off to his country house. It was quite in vain
+that Henry wrote to him representing that this conduct was
+dishonouring to them both, and that the only place for a prince
+of the blood was the court of his sovereign.
+
+The end of it all was that the reckless and romantic Henry took
+to night-prowling about the grounds of Conde's chateau. In the
+disguise of a peasant you see his Majesty of France and Navarre,
+whose will was law in Europe, shivering behind damp hedges,
+ankle-deep in wet grass, spending long hours in love-lore,
+ecstatic contemplation of her lighted window, and all--so far as
+we can gather--for no other result than the aggravation of
+certain rheumatic troubles which should have reminded him that he
+was no longer of an age to pursue these amorous pernoctations.
+
+But where his stiffening joints failed, the Queen succeeded.
+Henry had been spied upon, of course, as he always was when he
+strayed from the path of matrimonial rectitude. The Concinis saw
+to that. And when they judged the season ripe, they put her
+Majesty in possession of the facts. So inflamed was she by this
+fresh breach of trust that war was declared anew between the
+royal couple, and the best that Sully's wit and labours could now
+accomplish was a sort of armed truce.
+
+And then at last in the following November the Prince de Conde
+took the desperate resolve of quitting France with his wife,
+without troubling--as was his duty--to obtain the King's consent.
+On the last night of that month, as Henry was at cards in the
+Louvre, the Chevalier du Guet brought him the news of the
+prince's flight.
+
+"I never in my life," says Bassompierre, who was present, "saw a
+man so distracted or in so violent a passion."
+
+He flung down his cards, and rose, sending his chair crashing
+over behind him. "I am undone!" was his cry. "Undone! This madman
+has carried off his wife--perhaps to kill her." White and
+shaking, he turned to Bassompierre. "Take care of my money," he
+bade him, "and go on with the game."
+
+He lurched out of the room, and dispatched a messenger to the
+Arsenal to fetch M. de Sully. Sully obeyed the summons and came
+at once, but in an extremely bad temper, for it was late at
+night, and he was overburdened with work.
+
+He found the King in the Queen's chamber, walking backward and
+forward, his head sunk upon his breast, his hands clenched behind
+him. The Queen, a squarely-built, square-faced woman, sat apart,
+attended by a few of her ladies and one or two gentlemen of her
+train. Her countenance was set and inscrutable, and her brooding
+eyes were fixed upon the King.
+
+"Ha, Grand Master!" was Henry's greeting, his voice harsh and
+strained. "What do you say to this? What is to be done now?"
+
+"Nothing at all, sire," says Sully, as calm as his master was
+excited.
+
+"Nothing! What sort of advice is that?"
+
+"The best advice that you can follow, sire. This affair should be
+talked of as little as possible, nor should it appear to be of
+any consequence to you, or capable of giving you the least
+uneasiness."
+
+The Queen cleared her throat huskily. "Good advice, Monsieur le
+Duc," she approved him. "He will be wise to follow it." Her voice
+strained, almost threatening. "But in this matter I doubt wisdom
+and he have long since become strangers."
+
+That put him in a passion, and in a passion he left her to do the
+maddest thing he had ever done. In the garb of a courier, and
+with a patch over one eye to complete his disguise, he set out in
+pursuit of the fugitives. He had learnt that they had taken the
+road to Landrecy, which was enough for him. Stage by stage he
+followed them in that flight to Flanders, picking up the trail as
+he went, and never pausing until he had reached the frontier
+without overtaking them.
+
+It was all most romantic, and the lady, when she learnt of it,
+shed tears of mingled joy and rage, and wrote him impassioned
+letters in which she addressed him as her knight, and implored
+him, as he loved her, to come and deliver her from the detestable
+tyrant who held her in thrall. Those perfervid appeals completed
+his undoing, drove him mad, and blinded him to everything--even
+to the fact that his wife, too, was shedding tears, and that
+these were of rage undiluted by any more tender emotion.
+
+He began by sending Praslin to require the Archduke to order the
+Prince of Conde to leave his dominions. And when the Archduke
+declined with dignity to be guilty of any such breach of the law
+of nations, Henry dispatched Cccuvres secretly to Brussels to
+carry off thence the princess. But Maria de' Medici was on the
+alert, anti frustrated the design by sending a warning of what
+was intended to the Marquis Spinola, as a result of which the
+Prince de Conde and his wife were housed for greater security in
+the Archduke's own palace.
+
+Checkmated at all points, yet goaded further by the letters which
+he continued to receive from that most foolish of princesses,
+Henry took the wild decision that to obtain her he would invade
+the Low Countries as the first step in the execution of that
+design of a war with Spain which hitherto had been little more
+than a presence. The matter of the Duchy of Cleves was a pretext
+ready to his hand. To obtain the woman he desired he would set
+Europe in a blaze.
+
+He took that monstrous resolve at the very beginning of the
+new year, and in the months that followed France rang with
+preparations. It rang, too, with other things which should have
+given him pause. It rang with the voice of preachers giving
+expression to the popular vied; that Cleves was not worth
+fighting for, that the war was unrighteous--a war undertaken by
+Catholic France to defend Protestant interests against the very
+champions of Catholicism in Europe. And soon it began to ring,
+tool with prophecies of the King's approaching end.
+
+These prognostics rained upon him from every quarter. Thomassin,
+and the astrologer La Brosse, warned him of a message from the
+stars that May would be fraught with danger for him. From Rome--
+from the very pope himself Came notice of a conspiracy against
+him in which he was told that the very highest in the land
+were engaged. From Embrun, Bayonne, and Douai came messages of
+like purport, and early in May a note was found one morning on
+the altar of the church of Montargis announcing the King's
+approaching death.
+
+But that is to anticipate. Meanwhile, Henry had pursued his
+preparations undeterred by either warnings or prognostications.
+There had been so many conspiracies against his life already that
+he was become careless and indifferent in such matters. Yet
+surely there never had been one that was so abundantly heralded
+from every quarter, or ever one that was hatched under conditions
+so propitious as those which he had himself created now. In his
+soul he was not at ease, and the source of his uneasiness was the
+coronation of the Queen, for which the preparations were now
+going forward.
+
+He must have known that if danger of assassination threatened him
+from any quarter it was most to be feared from those whose
+influence with the Queen was almost such as to give them a
+control over her--the Concinis and their unavowed but obvious
+ally the Duke of Epernon. If he were dead, and the Queen so left
+that she could be made absolute regent during the Dauphin's
+minority, it was those adventurers who would become through her
+the true rulers of France, and so enrich themselves and gratify
+to the full their covetous ambitions. He saw clearly that his
+safety lay in opposing this coronation--already fixed for the
+13th May--which Maria de' Medici was so insistent should take
+place before his departure for the wars. The matter so preyed
+upon his mind that last he unburdened himself to Sully one day at
+the Arsenal.
+
+"Oh, my friend," he cried, "this coronation does not please me.
+My heart tells me that some fatality will follow."
+
+He sat down, grasping the case of his reading-glass, whilst Sully
+could only stare at him amazed by this out-burst. Thus he remained
+awhile in deep thought. Then he started up again.
+
+"Pardieu!" he cried. "I shall be murdered in this city. It is
+their only resource. I see it plainly. This cursed coronation
+will be the cause of my death."
+
+"What a thought, sir!"
+
+"You think that I have been reading the almanach or paying heed
+to the prophets, eh? But listen to me now, Grand Master." And
+wrinkles deepened about the bold, piercing eyes. "It is four
+months and more since we announced our intention of going to war,
+and France has resounded with our preparations. We have made no
+secret of it. Yet in Spain not a finger has been lifted in
+preparation to resist us, not a sword has been sharpened. Upon
+what does Spain build? Whence her confidence that in despite of
+my firm resolve and my abundant preparations, despite the fact
+announced that I am to march on the lath of this month, despite
+the fact that my troops are already in Champagne with a train of
+artillery so complete and well-furnished that France has never
+seen the like of it, and perhaps never will again--whence the
+confidence that despite all this there is no need to prepare
+defences? Upon what do they build, I say, when they assume, as
+assume they must, that there will be no war? Resolve me that,
+Grand Master."
+
+But Sully, overwhelmed, could only gasp and ejaculate.
+
+"You had not thought of it, eh? Yet it is clear enough Spain
+builds on my death. And who are the friends of Spain here in
+France? Who was it intrigued with Spain in such a way and to
+such ends as in my lifetime could never have been carried to an
+issue? Ha! You see."
+
+"I cannot, sire. It is too horrible. It is impossible!" cried
+that loyal, honest gentleman. "And yet if you are convinced of
+it, you should break off this coronation, your journey, and your
+war. If you wish it so, it is not difficult to satisfy you."
+
+"Ay, that is it." He came to his feet, and gripped the duke's
+shoulder in his strong, nervous hand. "Break off this coronation,
+and never let me hear of it again. That will suffice. Thus I can
+rid my mind of apprehensions, and leave Paris with nothing to
+fear."
+
+"Very well. I will send at once to Notre Dame and to St. Denis,
+to stop the preparations and dismiss the workmen."
+
+"Ah, wait." The eyes that for a moment had sparkled with new
+hope, grew dull again; the lines of care descended between the
+brows. "Oh, what to decide! What to decide! It is what I wish, my
+friend. But how will my wife take it?"
+
+"Let her take it as she will. I cannot believe that she will
+continue obstinate when she knows what apprehensions you have of
+disaster."
+
+"Perhaps not, perhaps not," he answered. But his tone was not
+sanguine. "Try to persuade her, Sully. Without her consent I
+cannot do this thing. But you will know how to persuade her. Go
+to her."
+
+Sully suspended the preparations for the coronation, and sought
+the Queen. For three days, he tells us, he used prayers, entreaties,
+and arguments with which to endeavour to move her. But all was
+labour lost. Maria de' Medici was not to be moved. To all Sully's
+arguments she opposed an argument that was unanswerable.
+
+Unless she were crowned Queen of France, as was her absolute
+right, she would be a person of no account and subject to the
+Council of Regency during the King's absence, a position unworthy
+and intolerable to her, the mother of the Dauphin.
+
+And so it was Henry's part to yield. His hands were tied by the
+wrongs that he had done, and the culminating wrong that he was
+doing her by this very war, as he had himself openly acknowledged.
+He had chanced one day to ask the Papal Nuncio what Rome thought
+of this war.
+
+"Those who have the best information," the Nuncio answered
+boldly, "are of opinion that the principal object of the war is
+the Princess of Conde, whom your Majesty wishes to bring back to
+France."
+
+Angered by this priestly insolence, Henry's answer had been an
+impudently defiant acknowledgment of the truth of that allegation.
+
+"Yes, by God!" he cried. "Yes--most certainly I want to have her
+back, and I will have her back; no one shall hinder me, not even
+God's viceregent on earth."
+
+Having uttered those words, which he knew to have been carried to
+the Queen, and to have wounded her perhaps more deeply than
+anything that had yet happened in this affair, his conscience
+left him, despite his fears, powerless now to thwart her even to
+the extent of removing those pernicious familiars of hers of
+whose plottings he had all but positive evidence.
+
+And so the coronation was at last performed with proper pomp and
+magnificence at St. Denis on Thursday, the 13th May. It had been
+concerted that the festivities should last four days and conclude
+on the Sunday with the Queen's public entry into Paris. On the
+Monday the King was to set out to take command of his armies,
+which were already marching upon the frontiers.
+
+Thus Henry proposed, but the Queen--convinced by his own
+admission of the real aim and object of the war, and driven by
+outraged pride to hate the man who offered her this crowning
+insult, and determined that at all costs it must be thwarted--had
+lent an ear to Concini's purpose to avenge her, and was ready to
+repay infidelity with infidelity. Concini and his fellow-
+conspirators had gone to work so confidently that a week before
+the coronation a courier had appeared in Liege, announcing that
+he was going with news of Henry's assassination to the Princes of
+Germany, whilst at the same time accounts of the King's death
+were being published in France and Italy.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever inward misgivings Henry may have entertained,
+outwardly at least he appeared serene and good-humoured at his
+wife's coronation, gaily greeting her at the end of the ceremony
+by the title of "Madam Regent."
+
+The little incident may have touched her, arousing her conscience.
+For that night she disturbed his slumbers by sudden screams, and
+when he sprang up in solicitous alarm she falteringly told him
+of a dream in which she had seen him slain, and fell to imploring
+him with a tenderness such as had been utterly foreign to her of
+late to take great care of himself in the days to come. In the
+morning she renewed those entreaties, beseeching him not to leave
+the Louvre that day, urging that she had a premonition it would
+be fatal to him.
+
+He laughed for answer. "You have heard of the predictions of La
+Brosse," said he. "Bah! You should not attach credit to such
+nonsense."
+
+Anon came the Duke of Vendome, his natural son by the Marquise de
+Verneuil, with a like warning and a like entreaty, only to
+receive a like answer.
+
+Being dull and indisposed as a consequence of last night's broken
+rest, Henry lay down after dinner. But finding sleep denied him,
+he rose, pensive and gloomy, and wandered aimlessly down, and out
+into the courtyard. There an exempt of the guard, of whom he
+casually asked the time, observing the King's pallor and
+listlessness, took the liberty of suggesting that his Majesty
+might benefit if he took the air.
+
+That chance remark decided Henry's fate. His eyes quickened
+responsively. "You advise well," said he. "Order my coach. I will
+go to the Arsenal to see the Duc de Sully, who is indisposed."
+
+On the stones beyond the gates, where lackeys were wont to await
+their masters, sat a lean fellow of some thirty years of age, in
+a dingy, clerkly attire, so repulsively evil of countenance that
+he had once been arrested on no better grounds than because it
+was deemed impossible that a man with such a face could be other
+than a villain.
+
+Whilst the coach was being got ready, Henry re-entered the
+Louvre, and startled the Queen by announcing his intention. With
+fearful insistence she besought him to countermand the order, and
+not to leave the palace.
+
+"I will but go there and back," he said, laughing at her fears.
+"I shall have returned before you realize that I have gone." And
+so he went, never to return alive.
+
+He sat at the back of the coach, and the weather being fine all
+the curtains were drawn up so that he might view the decorations
+of the city against the Queen's public entry on Sunday. The Duc
+d'Epernon was on his right, the Duc de Montbazon and the Marquis
+de la Force on his left. Lavordin and Roquelaure were in the
+right boot, whilst near the left boot, opposite to Henry, sat
+Mirebeau and du Plessis Liancourt. He was attended only by a
+small number of gentlemen on horseback, and some footmen.
+
+The coach turned from the Rue St. Honore into the narrow Rue de
+la Ferronerie, and there was brought to a halt by a block
+occasioned by the meeting of two carts, one laden with hay, the
+other with wine. The footmen went ahead with the exception of
+two. Of these, one advanced to clear a way for the royal vehicle,
+whilst the other took the opportunity to fasten his garter.
+
+At that moment, gliding like a shadow between the coach and the
+shops, came that shabby, hideous fellow who had been sitting on
+the stones outside the Louvre an hour ago. Raising himself by
+deliberately standing upon one of the spokes of the stationary
+wheel, he leaned over the Duc d'Epernon, and, whipping a long,
+stout knife from his sleeve, stabbed Henry in the breast. The
+King, who was in the act of reading a letter, cried out, and
+threw up his arms in an instinctive warding movement, thereby
+exposing his heart. The assassin stabbed again, and this time the
+blade went deep.
+
+With a little gasping cough, Henry sank together, and blood
+gushed from his mouth.
+
+The predictions were fulfilled; the tale borne by the courier
+riding through Liege a week ago was made true, as were the
+stories of his death already at that very hour circulating in
+Antwerp, Malines, Brussels, and elsewhere.
+
+The murderer aimed yet a third blow, but this at last was parried
+by Epernon, whereupon the fellow stepped back from the coach, and
+stood there, making no attempt to escape, or even to rid himself
+of the incriminating knife. St. Michel, one of the King's
+gentlemen-in-waiting, who had followed the coach, whipped out his
+sword and would have slain him on the spot had he not been
+restrained by Epernon. The footmen seized the fellow, and
+delivered him over to the captain of the guard. He proved to be a
+school-master of Angouleme--which was Epernon's country. His name
+was Ravaillac.
+
+The curtains of the coach were drawn, the vehicle was put about,
+and driven back to the Louvre, whilst to avoid all disturbance it
+was announced to the people that the King was merely wounded.
+
+But St. Michel went on to the Arsenal, taking with him the knife
+that had stabbed his master, to bear the sinister tidings to
+Henry's loyal and devoted friend. Sully knew enough to gauge
+exactly whence the blow had proceeded. With anger and grief in
+his heart he got to horse, ill as he was, and, calling together
+his people, set out presently for the Louvre, with a train one
+hundred strong, which was presently increased to twice that
+number by many of the King's faithful servants who joined his
+company as he advanced. In the Rue de la Pourpointicre a man in
+passing slipped a note into his hand.
+
+It was a brief scrawl: "Monsieur, where are ye going? It is done.
+I have seen him dead. If you enter the Louvre you will not escape
+any more than he did."
+
+Nearing St. Innocent, the warning was repeated, this time by a
+gentleman named du Jon, who stopped to mutter:
+
+"Monsieur le Duc, our evil is without remedy. Look to yourself,
+for this strange blow will have fearful consequences."
+
+Again in the Rue St. Honore another note was thrown him, whose
+contents were akin to those of the first. Yet with misgivings
+mounting swiftly to certainty, Sully rode amain towards the
+Louvre, his train by now amounting to some three hundred horse.
+But at the end of the street he was stopped by M. de Vitry, who
+drew rein as they met.
+
+"Ah, monsieur," Vitry greeted him, "where are you going with such
+a following? They will never suffer you to enter the Louvre with
+more than two or three attendants, which I would not advise you
+to do. For this plot does not end here. I have seen some persons
+so little sensible of the loss they have sustained that they
+cannot even simulate the grief they should feel. Go back,
+monsieur. There is enough for you to do without going to the
+Louvre."
+
+Persuaded by Vitry's solemnity, and by what he knew in his heart,
+Sully faced about and set out to retrace his steps. But presently
+he was overtaken by a messenger from the Queen, begging him to
+come at once to her at the Louvre, and to bring as few persons as
+possible with him. "This proposal," he writes, "to go alone and
+deliver myself into the hands of my enemies, who filled the
+Louvre, was not calculated to allay my suspicions."
+
+Moreover he received word at that moment that an exempt of the
+guards and a force of soldiers were already at the gates of the
+Arsenal, that others had been sent to the Temple, where the
+powder was stored, and others again to the treasurer of the
+Exchequer to stop all the money there.
+
+"Convey to the Queen my duty and service," he bade the messenger,
+"and assure her that until she acquaints me with her orders I
+shall continue assiduously to attend the affairs of my office."
+And with that he went to shut himself up in the Bastille, whither
+he was presently followed by a stream of her Majesty's envoys,
+all bidding him to the Louvre. But Sully, ill as he was, and now
+utterly prostrated by all that he had endured, put himself to bed
+and made of his indisposition a sufficient excuse.
+
+Yet on the morrow he allowed himself to be persuaded to obey her
+summons, receiving certain assurances that he had no ground for
+any apprehensions. Moreover, he may by now have felt a certain
+security in the esteem in which the Parisians held him. An
+attempt against him in the Louvre itself would prove that the
+blow that had killed his master was not the independent act of a
+fanatic, as it was being represented; and vengeance would follow
+swiftly upon the heads of those who would thus betray themselves
+of having made of that poor wretch's fanaticism an instrument to
+their evil ends.
+
+In that assurance he went, and he has left on record the burning
+indignation aroused in him at the signs of satisfaction,
+complacency, and even mirth that he discovered in that house of
+death. The Queen herself, however, overwrought by the events, and
+perhaps conscience-stricken by the tragedy which in the eleventh
+hour she had sought to avert, burst into tears at sight of Sully,
+and brought in the Dauphin, who flung himself upon the Duke's
+neck.
+
+"My son," the Queen addressed him, "this is Monsieur de Sully.
+You must love him well, for he was one of the best and most
+faithful servants of the King your father, and I entreat him to
+continue to serve you in the same manner."
+
+Words so fair might have convinced a man less astute that all his
+suspicions were unworthy. But, even then, the sequel would very
+quickly have undeceived him. For very soon thereafter his fall
+was brought about by the Concinis and their creatures, so that no
+obstacle should remain between themselves and the full gratification
+of their fell ambitions.
+
+At once he saw the whole policy of the dead King subversed; he
+saw the renouncing of all ancient alliances, and the union of the
+crowns of France and Spain; the repealing of all acts of
+pacification; the destruction of the Protestants; the dissipation
+of the treasures amassed by Henry; the disgrace of those who
+would not receive the yoke of the new favourites. All this Sully
+witnessed in his declining years, and he witnessed, too, the
+rapid rise to the greatest power and dignity in the State of that
+Florentine adventurer, Concino Concini--now bearing the title of
+Marshal d'Ancre--who had so cunningly known how to profit by a
+Queen's jealousy and a King's indiscretions.
+
+As for the miserable Ravaillac, it is pretended that he
+maintained under torture and to the very hour of his death that
+he had no accomplices, that what he had done he had done to
+prevent an unrighteous war against Catholicism and the Pope--
+which was, no doubt, the falsehood with which those who used him
+played upon his fanaticism and whetted him to their service. I
+say "pretended" because, after all, complete records of his
+examinations are not discoverable, and there is a story that when
+at the point of death, seeing himself abandoned by those in whom
+perhaps he had trusted, he signified a desire to confess, and did
+so confess; but the notary Voisin, who took his depositions in
+articulo mortis, set them down in a hand so slovenly as to be
+afterwards undecipherable.
+
+That may or may not be true. But the statement that when the
+President du Harlay sought to pursue inquiries into certain
+allegations by a woman named d'Escoman, which incriminated the
+Duc d'Epernon, he received a royal order to desist, rests upon
+sound authority.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+That is the story of the assassination of Henry IV. re-told in
+the light of certain records which appear to me to have been
+insufficiently studied. They should suggest a train of speculation
+leading to inferences which, whilst obvious, I hesitate to define
+absolutely.
+
+"If it be asked," says Perefixe, "who were the friends that
+suggested to Ravaillac so damnable a design, history replies that
+it is ignorant and that upon an action of Such consequences it is
+not permissible to give suspicions and conjectures for certain
+truths. The judges themselves who interrogated him dared not open
+their mouths, and never mentioned the matter but with gestures of
+horror and amazement."
+
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE BARREN WOOING
+
+The Murder of Amy Robsart
+
+
+
+There had been a banquet, followed by a masque, and this again by
+a dance in which the young queen had paired off with Lord Robert
+Dudley, who in repute was the handsomest man in Europe, just as
+in fact he was the vainest, shallowest, and most unscrupulous.
+There had been homage and flattery lavishly expressed, and there
+was a hint of masked hostility from certain quarters to spice the
+adventure, and to thrill her bold young spirit. Never yet in all
+the months of her reign since her coronation in January of last
+year had she felt so much a queen, and so conscious of the power
+of her high estate; never so much a woman, and so conscious of
+the weakness of her sex. The interaction of those conflicting
+senses wrought upon her like a heady wine. She leaned more
+heavily upon the silken arm of her handsome Master of the Horse,
+and careless in her intoxication of what might be thought or
+said, she--who by the intimate favour shown him had already
+loosed the tongue of Scandal and set it chattering in every court
+in Europe--drew him forth from that thronged and glittering
+chamber of the Palace of Whitehall into the outer solitude and
+friendly gloom.
+
+And he, nothing loth to obey the suasion of that white hand upon
+his arm, exultant, indeed, to parade before them all the power he
+had with her, went willingly enough. Let Norfolk and Sussex
+scowl, let Arundel bite his lip until it bled, and sober Cecil
+stare cold disapproval. They should mend their countenances soon,
+and weigh their words or be for ever silenced, when he was master
+in England. And that he would soon be master he was assured to-
+night by every glance of her blue eyes, by the pressure of that
+fair hand upon his arm, by the languishing abandonment with which
+that warm young body swayed towards him, as they passed out from
+the blaze of lights and the strains of music into the gloom and
+silence of the gallery leading to the terrace.
+
+"Out--let us go out, Robin. Let me have air," she almost panted,
+as she drew him on.
+
+Assuredly he would be master soon. Indeed, he might have been
+master already but for that wife of his, that stumbling-block to
+his ambition, who practiced the housewifely virtues at Cumnor
+Place, and clung so tenaciously and so inconsiderately to life in
+spite of all his plans to relieve her of the burden of it.
+
+For a year and more his name had been coupled with the Queen's in
+a tale that hurt her honour as a woman and imperilled her dignity
+as a sovereign. Already in October of 1559 Alvarez de Quadra, the
+Spanish ambassador, had written home: "I have learnt certain
+things as to the terms on which the Queen and Lord Robert stand
+towards each other which I could not have believed."
+
+That was at a time when de Quadra was one of a dozen ambassadors
+who were competing for her hand, and Lord Robert had, himself,
+appeared to be an ally of de Quadra and an advocate of the
+Spanish marriage with the Archduke Charles. But it was a presence
+which nowise deceived the astute Spaniard, who employed a legion
+of spies to keep him well informed.
+
+"All the dallying with us," he wrote, "all the dallying with the
+Swede, all the dallying there will be with the rest, one after
+another, is merely to keep Lord Robert's enemies in play until
+his villainy about his wife can be executed."
+
+What that particular villainy was, the ambassador had already
+stated earlier in his letter. "I have learnt from a person who
+usually gives me true information that Lor d Robert has sent to
+have his wife poisoned."
+
+What had actually happened was that Sir Richard Verney--a trusted
+retainer of Lord Robert's--had reported to Dr. Bayley, of New
+College, Oxford, that Lady Robert Dudley was "sad and ailing,"
+and had asked him for a potion. But the doctor was learned in
+more matters than physic. He had caught an echo of the tale of
+Lord Robert's ambition; he had heard a whisper that whatever
+suitors might come from overseas for Elizabeth, she would marry
+none but "my lord"--as Lord Robert was now commonly styled. More,
+he had aforetime heard rumours of the indispositions of Lady
+Robert, yet had never found those rumours verified by the fact.
+Some months ago, it had been reported that her ladyship was
+suffering from cancer of the breast and likely soon to die of it.
+Yet Dr. Bayley had reason to know that a healthier woman did not
+live in Berkshire.
+
+The good doctor was a capable deductive reasoner, and the
+conclusion to which he came was that if they poisoned her under
+cover of his potion--she standing in no need of physic--he might
+afterwards be hanged as a cover for their crime. So he refused to
+prescribe as he was invited, nor troubled to make a secret of
+invitation and refusal.
+
+For awhile, then, Lord Robert had prudently held his hand;
+moreover, the urgency there had been a year ago, when that host
+of foreign suitors laid siege to Elizabeth of England, had
+passed, and his lordship could afford to wait. But now of a
+sudden the urgency was returned. Under the pressure brought to
+bear upon her to choose a husband, Elizabeth had half-committed
+herself to marry the Archduke Charles, promising the Spanish
+ambassador a definite answer within a few days.
+
+Lord Robert had felt the earth to be quaking under him; he had
+seen the ruin of his high ambitions; he had watched with rage the
+expanding mockery upon the countenances of Norfolk, Sussex, and
+those others who hated and despised him; and he had cursed that
+wife of his who knew not when to die. But for that obstinacy with
+which she clung to life he had been the Queen's husband these
+many months, so making an end to suspense and to the danger that
+lies in delay.
+
+To-night the wantonness with which the Queen flaunted before the
+eyes of all her court the predilection in which she held him,
+came not merely to lull his recent doubts and fears, to feed his
+egregious vanity, and to assure him that in her heart he need
+fear no rival; it came also to set his soul Quiver impotent rage.
+He had but to put forth his hands to possess himself of this
+splendid prize. Yet those hands of his were bound while that
+woman lived at Cumnor. Conceive his feelings as they stole away
+together like any pair of lovers.
+
+Arm in arm they came by a stone gallery, where a stalwart scarlet
+sentinel, a yeoman of the guard, with a Tudor rose embroidered in
+gold upon his back, stood under a lamp set in the wall, with
+grounded pike and body stiffly erect.
+
+The tall young Queen was in crimson satin with cunningly-wrought
+silver embroideries, trimmed with tufted silver fringe, her
+stomacher stiff with silver bullion studded with gold rosettes
+and Roman pearls, her bodice cut low to display her splendid
+neck, decked by a carcanet of pearls and rubies, and surmounted
+by a fan-like cuff of guipure, high behind and sloping towards
+the bust. Thus she appeared to the sentinel as the rays of the
+single lamp behind him struck fire from her red-gold hair. As if
+by her very gait to express the wantonness of her mood, she
+pointed her toes and walked with head thrown back, smiling up
+into the gipsy face of her companion, who was arrayed from head
+to foot in shimmering ivory satin, with an elegance no man in
+England could have matched.
+
+They came by that stone gallery to a little terrace above the
+Privy Steps. A crescent moon hung low over the Lambeth marshes
+across the river. From a barge that floated gay with lights in
+mid-stream came a tinkle of lutes, and the sweet voice of a
+singing boy. A moment the lovers stood at gaze, entranced by the
+beauty of the soft, tepid September night, so subtly adapted to
+their mood. Then she fetched a sigh, and hung more heavily upon
+his arm, leaned nearer to his tall, vigorous, graceful figure.
+
+"Robin, Robin!" was all she said, but in her voice throbbed a
+world of passionate longing, an exquisite blend of delight and
+pain.
+
+Judging the season ripe, his arm flashed round her, and drew her
+fiercely close. For a moment she was content to yield, her head
+against his stalwart shoulder, a very woman nestling to the mate
+of her choice, surrendering to her master. Then the queen in her
+awoke and strangled nature. Roughly she disengaged herself from
+his arm, and stood away, her breathing quickened.
+
+
+"God's Death, Robin!" There was a harsh note in the voice that
+lately had cooed so softly. "You are strangely free, I think."
+
+But he, impudence incarnate, nothing abashed, accustomed to her
+gusty moods, to her alternations between the two natures she had
+inherited--from overbearing father and wanton mother--was
+determined at all costs to take the fullest advantage of the
+hour, to make an end of suspense.
+
+"I am not free, but enslaved--by love and worship of you. Would
+you deny me; Would you?"
+
+"Not I, but fate," she answered heavily, and he knew that the
+woman at Cumnor was in her mind.
+
+"Fate will soon mend the wrong that fate has done--very soon
+now." He took her hand, and, melted again from her dignity, she
+let it lie in his. "When that is done, sweet, then will I claim
+you for my own."
+
+"When that is done, Robin?" she questioned almost fearfully, as
+if a sudden dread suspicion broke upon her mind. "When what is
+done?"
+
+He paused a moment to choose his words, what time she stared
+intently into the face that gleamed white in the surrounding
+gloom.
+
+"When that poor ailing spirit is at rest." And he added: "It will
+be soon."
+
+"Thou hast said the same aforetime, Robin. Yet it has not so
+fallen out."
+
+"She has clung to life beyond what could have been believed of
+her condition," he explained, unconscious of any sinister
+ambiguity. "But the end, I know, is very near--a matter but of
+days."
+
+"Of days!" she shivered, and moved forward to the edge of the
+terrace, he keeping step beside her. Then she stood awhile in
+silence, looking down at the dark oily surge of water. "You loved
+her once, Robin?" she asked, in a queer, unnatural voice.
+
+"I never loved but once," answered that perfect courtier.
+
+"Yet you married her--men say it was a love marriage. It was a
+marriage, anyway, and you can speak so calmly of her death?" Her
+tone was brooding. She sought understanding that should silence
+her own lingering doubt of him.
+
+"Where lies the blame? Who made me what I am?" Again his bold arm
+encompassed her. Side by side they peered down through the gloom
+at the rushing waters, and he seized an image from them. "Our
+love is like that seething tide," he said. "To resist it is to
+labour in agony awhile, and then to perish."
+
+"And to yield is to be swept away."
+
+"To happiness," he cried, and reverted to his earlier prayer.
+"Say that when . . . that afterwards, I may claim you for my own.
+Be true to yourself, obey the voice of instinct, and so win to
+happiness."
+
+She looked up at him, seeking to scan the handsome face in that
+dim light that baffled her, and he observed the tumultuous heave
+of her white breast.
+
+"Can I trust thee, Robin? Can I trust thee? Answer me true!" she
+implored him, adorably weak, entirely woman now.
+
+"What does your own heart answer you?" quoth he, loaning close
+above her.
+
+"I think I can, Robin. And, anyway, I must. I cannot help myself.
+I am but a woman, after all," she murmured, and sighed. "Be it as
+thou wilt. Come to me again when thou art free."
+
+He bent lower, murmuring incoherently, and she put up a hand to
+pat his swarthy bearded cheek.
+
+"I shall make thee greater than any man in England, so thou make
+me happier than any woman."
+
+He caught the hand in his and kissed it passionately, his soul
+singing a triumph song within him. Norfolk and Sussex and those
+other scowling ones should soon be whistled to the master's heel.
+
+As they turned arm in arm into the gallery to retrace their
+steps, they came suddenly face to face with a slim, sleek
+gentleman, who bowed profoundly, a smile upon h is crafty,
+shaven, priestly face. In a smooth voice and an accent markedly
+foreign, he explained that he, too, sought the cool of the
+terrace, not thinking to intrude; and upon that, bowing again, he
+passed on and effaced himself. It was Alvarez de Quadra, Bishop
+of Aquila, the argus-eyed ambassador of Spain.
+
+The young face of the Queen hardened.
+
+"I would I were as well served abroad as the King of Spain is
+here," she said aloud, that the retreating ambassador might hear
+the dubious compliment; and for my lord's ear alone she added
+under her breath: "The spy! Philip of Spain will hear of this."
+
+"So that he hears something more, what shall it signify?" quoth
+my lord, and laughed.
+
+They paced the length of the gallery in silence, past the yeoman
+of the guard, who kept his watch, and into the first antechamber.
+Perhaps it was that meeting with de Quadra and my lord's answer
+to her comment that prompted what now she asked: "What is it ails
+her, Robin?"
+
+"A wasting sickness," he answered, never doubting to whom the
+question alluded.
+
+"You said, I think, that . . . that the end is very near."
+
+He caught her meaning instantly. "Indeed, if she is not dead
+already, she is very nearly so."
+
+He lied, for never had Amy Dudley been in better health. And yet
+he spoke the truth, for in so much as her life depended upon his
+will, it was as good as spent. This was, he knew, a decisive
+moment of his career. The hour was big with fate. If now he were
+weak or hesitant, the chance might slip away and be for ever lost
+to him. Elizabeth's moods were as uncertain as were certain the
+hostile activities of my lord's enemies. He must strike quickly
+whilst she was in her present frame of mind, and bring her to
+wedlock, be it in public or in private. But first he must shake
+off the paralysing encumbrance of that house-wife down at Cumnor.
+
+I believe--from evidence that I account abundant--that he
+considered it with the cold remorselessness of the monstrous
+egotist he was. An upstart, great-grandson to a carpenter, noble
+only in two descents, and in both of them stained by the block,
+he found a queen--the victim of a physical passion that took no
+account of the worthlessness underlying his splendid exterior--
+reaching out a hand to raise him to a throne. Being what he was,
+he weighed his young wife's life at naught in the evil scales of
+his ambition. And yet he had loved her once, more truly perhaps
+than he could now pretend to love the Queen.
+
+It was some ten years since, as a lad of eighteen, he had taken
+Sir John Robsart's nineteen-year-old daughter to wife. She had
+brought him considerable wealth and still more devotion. Because
+of this devotion she was content to spend her days at Cumnor,
+whilst he ruffled it at court; content to take such crumbs of
+attention as he could spare her upon occasion. And during the
+past year, whilst he had been plotting her death, she had been
+diligently caring for his interests and fostering the prosperity
+of the Berkshire estate. If he thought of this at all, he allowed
+no weakly sentiment to turn him from his purpose. There was too
+much at stake for that--a throne, no less.
+
+And so, on the morning after that half-surrender of Elizabeth's,
+we find my lord closeted with his henchman, Sir Richard Verney.
+Sir Richard--like his master--was a greedy, unscrupulous,
+ambitious scoundrel, prepared to go to any lengths for the sake
+of such worldly advancement as it lay in my lord's power to give
+him. My lord perforce used perfect frankness with this perfect
+servant.
+
+"Thou'lt rise or fall with me, Dick," quoth he. "Help me up,
+then, and so mount with me. When I am King, as soon now I shall
+be, look to me. Now to the thing that is to do. Thou'lt have
+guessed it."
+
+To Sir Richard it was an easy guess, considering how much already
+he had been about this business. He signified as much.
+
+My lord shifted in his elbow-chair, and drew his embroidered
+bedgown of yellow satin closer about his shapely limbs.
+
+"Hast failed me twice before, Richard," said he. "God's death,
+man, fail me not again, or the last chance may go the way of the
+others. There's a magic in the number three. See that I profit by
+it, or I am undone, and thou with me."
+
+"I'd not have failed before, but for that suspicious dotard
+Bayley," grumbled Verney. "Your lordship bade me see that all was
+covered."
+
+"Aye, aye. And I bid thee so again. On thy life, leave no
+footprints by which we may be tracked. Bayley is not the only
+physician in Oxford. About it, then, and swiftly. Time is the
+very soul of fortune in this business, with the Spaniard
+straining at the leash, and Cecil and the rest pleading his case
+with her. Succeed, and thy fortune's made; fail, and trouble not
+to seek me again."
+
+Sir Richard bowed, and took his leave. As he reached the door,
+his lordship stayed him. "If thou bungle, do not look to me. The
+court goes to Windsor to-morrow. Bring me word there within the
+week." He rose, magnificently tall and stately, in his bedgown of
+embroidered yellow satin, his handsome head thrown back, and went
+after his retainer. "Thou'lt not fail me, Dick," said he, a hand
+upon the lesser scoundrel's shoulder. "There is much at issue for
+me, and for thee with me."
+
+"I will not fail you, my lord," Sir Richard rashly promised, and
+on that they parted.
+
+Sir Richard did not mean to fail. He knew the importance of
+succeeding, and he appreciated the urgency of the business as
+much as did my lord himself. But between his cold, remorseless
+will to succeed and success itself there lay a gulf which it
+needed all his resource to bridge. He paid a short visit to Lady
+Robert at Cumnor, and professed deepest concern to find in her a
+pallor and an ailing air which no one else had yet observed. He
+expressed himself on the subject to Mrs. Buttelar and the other
+members of her ladyship's household, reproaching them with their
+lack of care of their mistress. Mrs. Buttelar became indignant
+under his reproaches.
+
+"Nay, now, Sir Richard, do you wonder that my lady is sad and
+downcast with such tales as are going of my lord's doings at
+court, and of what there is 'twixt the Queen and him? Her
+ladyship may be too proud to complain, but she suffers the more
+for that, poor lamb. There was talk of a divorce awhile ago that
+got to her ears."
+
+"Old wives' tales," snorted Sir Richard.
+
+"Likely," agreed Mrs. Buttelar. "Yet when my lord neither comes
+to Cumnor, nor requires her ladyship to go to him, what is she to
+think, poor soul?"
+
+Sir Richard made light of all, and went off to Oxford to find a
+physician more accommodating than Dr. Bayley. But Dr. Bayley had
+talked too much, and it was in vain that Sir Richard pleaded with
+each of the two physicians he sought that her ladyship was
+ailing--"sad and heavy"--and that he must have a potion for her.
+
+Each in turn shook his head. They had no medicine for sorrow, was
+their discreet answer. From his description of her condition,
+said each, it was plain that her ladyship's sickness was of the
+mind, and, considering the tales that were afloat, neither was
+surprised.
+
+Sir Richard went back to his Oxford lodging with the feeling of a
+man checkmated. For two whole days of that precious time he lay
+there considering what to do. He thought of going to seek a
+physician in Abingdon. But fearing no better success in that
+quarter, fearing, indeed, that in view of the rumours abroad he
+would merely be multiplying what my lord called "footprints," he
+decided to take some other way to his master's ends. He was a
+resourceful, inventive scoundrel, and soon he had devised a plan.
+
+On Friday he wrote from Oxford to Lady Robert, stating that he
+had a communication for her on the subject of his lordship as
+secret as it was urgent. That he desired to come to her at Cumnor
+again, but dared not do so openly. He would come if she would
+contrive that her servants should be absent, and he exhorted her
+to let no one of them know that he was coming, else he might be
+ruined, out of his desire to serve her.
+
+That letter he dispatched by the hand of his servant Nunweek,
+desiring him to bring an answer. It was a communication that had
+upon her ladyship's troubled mind precisely the effect that the
+rascal conceived. There was about Sir Richard's personality
+nothing that could suggest the villain. He was a smiling, blue-
+eyed, florid gentleman, of a kindly manner that led folk to trust
+him. And on the occasion of his late visit to Cumnor he had
+displayed such tender solicitude that her ladyship--starved of
+affection as she was--had been deeply touched.
+
+His letter so cunningly couched filled her with vague alarm and
+with anxiety. She had heard so many and such afflicting rumours,
+and had received in my lord's cruel neglect of her such
+circumstantial confirmation of them, that she fastened avidly
+upon what she deemed the chance of learning at last the truth.
+Sir Richard Verney had my lord's confidence, and was much about
+the court in his attendance upon my lord. He would know the
+truth, and what could this letter mean but that he was disposed
+to tell it.
+
+So she sent him back a line in answer, bidding him come on Sunday
+afternoon. She would contrive to be alone in the house, so that
+he need not fear being seen by any.
+
+As she promised, so she performed, and on the Sunday packed off
+her household to the fair that was being held at Abingdon that
+day, using insistence with the reluctant, and particularly with
+one of her women, a Mrs. Oddingsell, who expressed herself
+strongly against leaving her ladyship alone in that lonely house.
+At length, however, the last of them was got off, and my lady was
+left impatiently to await her secret visitor. It was late
+afternoon when he arrived, accompanied by Nunweek, whom he left
+to hold the horses under the chestnuts in the avenue. Himself he
+reached the house across the garden, where the blighting hand of
+autumn was already at work.
+
+Within the porch he found her waiting, fretted by her impatience.
+
+"It is very good in you to have come, Sir Richard," was her
+gracious greeting.
+
+"I am your ladyship's devoted servant," was his sufficient
+answer, and he doffed his plumed bonnet, and bowed 1ow before
+her. "We shall be private in your bower above stairs," he added.
+
+"Why, we are private anywhere. I am all alone, as you desired."
+
+"That is very wise--most wise," said he. "Will your ladyship lead
+the way?"
+
+So they went up that steep, spiral staircase, which had loomed so
+prominently in the plans the ingenious scoundrel had evolved.
+Across the gallery on the first floor they entered a little room
+whose windows overlooked the garden. This was her bower--an
+intimate cosy room, reflecting on every hand the gentle,
+industrious personality of the owner. On an oak table near the
+window were spread some papers and account-books concerned with
+the estate--with which she had sought to beguile the time of
+waiting. She led the way towards this, and, sinking into the
+high-backed chair that stood before it, she looked up at him
+expectantly. She was pale, there were dark stains under her eyes,
+and wistful lines had crept into the sweet face of that neglected
+wife.
+
+Contemplating his poor victim now, Sir Richard may have compared
+her with the woman by whom my lord desired so impatiently to
+supplant her. She was tall and beautifully shaped, despite an
+almost maidenly slenderness. Her countenance was gentle and
+adorable, with its soft grey eyes and light brown hair, and
+tender, wistful mouth.
+
+It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently
+desired her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of
+her. Then he obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed
+the remorseless spur of ambition. In reality, then as now, his
+beacon-light was love of self.
+
+Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious
+impatience to hear the news of her lord which he had promised
+her, Sir Richard may have felt some pang of pity. But, like my
+lord, he was of those whose love of self suffers the rivalry of
+no weak emotion.
+
+"Your news, Sir Richard," she besought him, her dove-like glance
+upon his florid face--less florid now than was its wont.
+
+He leaned against the table, his back to the window. "Why, it is
+briefly this," said he. "My lord . . ." And then he checked, and
+fell into a listening attitude.
+
+"What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?"
+
+"No. What is it?" Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting
+under so much mystery.
+
+"Sh! Stay you here," he enjoined. "If we are spied upon . . ." He
+left the sentence there. Already he was moving quickly,
+stealthily, towards the door. He paused before opening it. "Stay
+where you are, my lady," he enjoined again, so gravely that she
+could have no thought of disobeying him. "I will return at once."
+
+He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There
+he stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of
+whipcord, attached at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle
+sharpness. That bodkin he drove into the edge of one of the
+panels of the wainscot, in line with the topmost step; drawing
+the cord taut at a height of a foot or so above this step, he
+made fast its other end to the newel-post at the stair-head. He
+had so rehearsed the thing in his mind that the performance of it
+occupied but a few seconds. Such dim light of that autumn
+afternoon as reached the spot would leave that fine cord
+invisible.
+
+Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his
+absence, so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to
+resolve upon disobeying his injunction.
+
+"We move in secret like conspirators," said he, "and so we are
+easily affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my
+lord himself . . . here?"
+
+"My lord!" she interrupted, coming excitedly to her feet. "Lord
+Robert?"
+
+"To be sure, my lady. It was he had need to visit you in secret--
+for did the Queen have knowledge of his coming here, it would
+mean the Tower for him. You cannot think what, out of love for
+you, his lordship suffers. The Queen . . I,
+
+"But do you say that he is here, man", her voice shrilled up in
+excitement.
+
+"He is below, my lady. Such is his peril that he dared not set
+foot in Cumnor until he was certain beyond doubt that you are
+here alone."
+
+"He is below!" she cried, and a flush dyed her pale cheeks, a
+light of gladness quickened her sad eyes. Already she had
+gathered from his cunning words a new and comforting explanation
+of the things reported to her. "He is below!" she repeated. "Oh!"
+She turned from him, and in an instant was speeding towards the
+door.
+
+He stood rooted there, his nether lip between his teeth, his face
+a ghastly white, whilst she ran on.
+
+"My lord! Robin! Robin!" he heard her calling, as she crossed the
+corridor. Then came a piercing scream that echoed through the
+silent house; a pause; a crashing thud below; and--silence.
+
+Sir Richard remained by the table, immovable. Blood was trickling
+down his chin. He had sunk his teeth through his lip when that
+scream rang out. A long moment thus, as if entranced, awe-
+stricken. Then he braced himself, and went forward, reeling at
+first like a drunken man. But by the time he had reached the
+stairs he was master of himself again. Swiftly, for all his
+trembling fingers, he unfastened the cord's end from the newel-
+post. The wrench upon it had already pulled the bodkin from the
+wainscot. He went down that abrupt spiral staircase at a moderate
+pace, mechanically coiling the length of whip-cord, and bestowing
+it with the bodkin in his pouch again, and all the while his eyes
+were fixed upon the grey bundle that lay so still at the stairs'
+foot.
+
+He came to it at last, and, pausing, looked more closely. He was
+thankful that there was not the need to touch it. The position of
+the brown-haired head was such as to leave no doubt of the
+complete success of his design. Her neck was broken. Lord Robert
+Dudley was free to marry the Queen.
+
+Deliberately Sir Richard stepped over the huddled body of that
+poor victim of a knave's ambition, crossed the hall, and passed
+out, closing the door. An excellent day's work, thought he, most
+excellently accomplished. The servants, returning from Abingdon
+Fair on that Sunday evening, would find her there. They would
+publish the fact that in their absence her ladyship had fallen
+downstairs and broken her neck, and that was the end of the
+matter.
+
+                     *   *   *   *   *   *
+
+But that was not the end at all. Fate, the ironic interloper, had
+taken a hand in this evil game.
+
+The court had moved a few days earlier to Windsor, and thither on
+the Friday--the 6th of September--came Alvarez de Quadra to seek
+the definite answer which the Queen had promised him on the
+subject of the Spanish marriage. What he had seen that night at
+Whitehall, coupled with his mistrust of her promises and
+experience of her fickleness, had rendered him uneasy. Either she
+was trifling with him, or else she was behaving in a manner
+utterly unbecoming the future wife of the Archduke. In either
+case some explanation was necessary. De Quadra must know where he
+stood. Having failed to obtain an audience before the court left
+London, he had followed it to Windsor, cursing all women and
+contemplating the advantages of the Salic law.
+
+He found at Windsor an atmosphere of constraint, and it was not
+until the morrow that he obtained an audience with the Queen.
+Even then this was due to chance rather than to design on the
+part of Elizabeth. For they met on the terrace as she was
+returning from hunting. She dismissed those about her, including
+the stalwart Robert Dudley, and, alone with de Quadra, invited
+him to speak.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am writing to my master, and I desire to
+know whether your Majesty would wish me to add anything to what
+you have announced already as your intention regarding the
+Archduke."
+
+She knit her brows. The wily Spaniard fenced so closely that
+there was no alternative but to come to grips.
+
+"Why, sir," she answered dryly, "you may tell his Majesty that I
+have come to an absolute decision, which is that I will not marry
+the Archduke."
+
+The colour mounted to the Spaniard's sallow cheeks. Iron self-
+control alone saved him from uttering unpardonable words. Even so
+he spoke sternly:
+
+"This, madame, is not what you had led me to believe when last we
+talked upon the subject."
+
+At another time Elizabeth might have turned upon him and rent him
+for that speech. But it happened that she was in high good-humour
+that afternoon, and disposed to indulgence. She laughed,
+surveying herself in the small steel mirror that dangled from her
+waist.
+
+"You are ungallant to remind me, my lord," said she. "My sex, you
+may have heard, is privileged to change of mind."
+
+"Then, madame, I pray that you may change it yet again." His tone
+was bitter.
+
+"Your prayer will not be heard. This time I am resolved."
+
+De Quadra bowed. "The King, my master, will not be pleased, I
+fear."
+
+She looked him straightly in the face, her dark eyes kindling.
+
+"God's death!" said she, "I marry to please myself, and not the
+King your master."
+
+"You are resolved on marriage then?" flashed he.
+
+"And it please you," she mocked him archly, her mood of
+joyousness already conquering her momentary indignation.
+
+"What pleases you must please me also, madame," he answered, in a
+tone so cold that it belied his words. "That it please you, is
+reason enough why you should marry . . . Whom did your Majesty
+say?"
+
+"Nay. I named no names. Yet one so astute might hazard a shrewd
+guess." Half-challenging, half-coy, she eyed him over her fan.
+
+"A guess? Nay, madame. I might affront your Majesty."
+
+"How so?"
+
+"If I were deluded by appearances. If I named a subject who
+signally enjoys your royal favour."
+
+"You mean Lord Robert Dudley." She paled a little, and her
+bosom's heave was quickened. "Why should the guess affront me?"
+
+"Because a queen--a wise queen, madame--does not mate with a
+subject--particularly with one who has a wife already."
+
+He had stung her. He had wounded at once the pride of the woman
+and the dignity of the queen, yet in a way that made it difficult
+for her to take direct offense. She bit her lip and mastered her
+surge of anger. Then she laughed, a thought sneeringly.
+
+"Why, as to my Lord Robert's wife, it seems you are less well-
+informed than usual, sir. Lady Robert Dudley is dead, or very
+nearly so."
+
+And as blank amazement overspread his face, she passed upon her
+way and left him.
+
+But anon, considering, she grew vaguely uneasy, and that very
+night expressed her afflicting doubt to my lord, reporting to him
+de Quadra's words. His lordship, who was mentally near-sighted,
+laughed.
+
+"He'll change his tone before long," said he.
+
+She set her hands upon his shoulders, and looked up adoringly
+into his handsome gipsy face. Never had he known her so fond as
+in these last days since her surrender to him that night upon the
+terrace at Whitehall, never had she been more the woman and less
+the queen in her bearing towards him.
+
+"You are sure, Robin? You are quite sure?" she pleaded.
+
+He drew her close, she yielding herself to his embrace. "With so
+much at stake could I be less than sure, sweet?" said he, and so
+convinced her--the more easily since he afforded her the
+conviction she desired.
+
+That was on the night of Saturday, and early on Monday came the
+news which justified him of his assurances. It was brought him to
+Windsor by one of Amy's Cumnor servants, a fellow named Bowes,
+who, with the others, had been away at Abingdon Fair yesterday
+afternoon, and had returned to find his mistress dead at the
+stairs' foot--the result of an accident, as all believed.
+
+It was not quite the news that my lord had been expecting. It
+staggered him a little that an accident so very opportune should
+have come to resolve his difficulties, obviating the need for
+recourse to those more dangerous measures with which he had
+charged Sir Richard Verney. He perceived how suspicion might now
+fall upon himself, how his enemies would direct it, and on the
+instant made provision. There and then he seized a pen, and wrote
+to his kinsman, Sir Thomas Blount, who even then was on his way
+to Cumnor. He stated in the letter what he had learnt from Bowes,
+bade Blount engage the coroner to make the strictest investigation,
+and send for Amy's natural brother, Appleyard. "Have no respect
+to any living person," was the final injunction of that letter
+which he sent Blount by the hand of Bowes.
+
+And, then, before he could carry to the Queen the news of this
+accident which had broken his matrimonial shackles, Sir Richard
+Verney arrived with the true account. He had expected praise and
+thanks from his master. Instead, he met first dismay, and then
+anger and fierce reproaches.
+
+"My lord, this is unjust," the faithful retainer protested.
+"Knowing the urgency, I took the only way--contrived the
+accident."
+
+"Pray God," said Dudley, "that the jury find it to have been an
+accident; for if the truth should come to be discovered, I leave
+you to the consequences. I warned you of that before you engaged
+in this. Look for no help from me."
+
+"I look for none," said Sir Richard, stung to hot contempt by the
+meanness and cowardice so characteristic of the miserable egotist
+he served. "Nor will there be the need, for I have left no
+footprints.
+
+"I hope that may be so, for I tell you, man, that I have ordered
+a strict inquiry, bidding them have no respect to any living
+person, and to that I shall adhere."
+
+"And if, in spite of that, I am not hanged?" quoth Sir Richard, a
+sneer upon his white face.
+
+"Come to me again when the affair is closed, and we will talk of
+it."
+
+Sir Richard went out, rage and disgust in his heart, leaving my
+lord with rage and fear in his.
+
+Grown calmer now, my lord dressed himself with care and sought
+the Queen to tell her of the accident that had removed the
+obstacle to their marriage. And that same night her Majesty
+coldly informed de Quadra that Lady Robert Dudley had fallen down
+a flight of stairs and broken her neck.
+
+The Spaniard received the information with a countenance that was
+inscrutable.
+
+"Your Majesty's gift of prophecy is not so widely known as it
+deserves to be," was his cryptic comment.
+
+She stared at him blankly a moment. Then a sudden uneasy memory
+awakened by his words, she drew him forward to a window embrasure
+apart from those who had stood about her, and for greater
+security addressed him, as he tells us, in Italian.
+
+"I do not think I understand you, sir. Will you be plain with
+me?" She stood erect and stiff, and frowned upon him after the
+manner of her bullying father. But de Quadra held the trumps, and
+was not easily intimidated.
+
+"About the prophecy?" said he. "Why, did not your Majesty
+foretell the poor lady's death a full day before it came to pass?
+Did you not say that she was already dead, or nearly so?"
+
+He saw her blench; saw fear stare from those dark eyes that could
+be so very bold. Then her ever-ready anger followed swiftly.
+
+"'Sblood, man! What do you imply?" she cried, and went on without
+waiting for his answer. "The poor woman was sick and ill, and
+must soon have succumbed; it will no doubt be found that the
+accident which anticipated nature was due to her condition."
+
+Gently he shook his head, relishing her discomfiture, taking
+satisfaction in torturing her who had flouted him and his master,
+in punishing her whom he had every reason to believe guilty.
+
+"Your Majesty, I fear, has been ill-informed on that score. The
+poor lady was in excellent health--and like to have lived for
+many years--at least, so I gather from Sir William Cecil, whose
+information is usually exact."
+
+She clutched his arm. "You told him what I had said?"
+
+"It was indiscreet, perhaps. Yet, how was I to know . . . ?" He
+left his sentence there. "I but expressed my chagrin at your
+decision on the score of the Archduke--hardly a wise decision, if
+I may be so bold," he added slyly.
+
+She caught the suggestion of a bargain, and became instantly
+suspicious,
+
+"You transcend the duties of your office, my lord," she rebuked
+him, and turned away.
+
+But soon that night she was closeted with Dudley, and closely
+questioning him about the affair. My lord was mightily vehement.
+
+"I take Heaven to be my witness," quoth he, when she all but
+taxed him with having procured his lady's death, "that I am
+innocent of any part in it. My injunctions to Blount, who has
+gone to Cumnor, are that the matter be sifted without respect to
+any person, and if it can be shown that this is other than the
+accident I deem it, the murderer shall hang."
+
+She flung her arms about his neck, and laid her head on his
+shoulder. "Oh, Robin, Robin, I am full of fears," she wailed, and
+was nearer to tears than he had ever seen her.
+
+But, anon, as the days passed their fears diminished, and finally
+the jury at Cumnor--delayed in their finding, and spurred by my
+lord to exhaustive inquiries--returned a verdict of "found dead,"
+which in all the circumstances left his lordship--who was known,
+moreover, to have been at Windsor when his lady died--fully
+acquitted. Both he and the Queen took courage from that finding,
+and made no secret of it now that they would very soon be wed.
+
+But there were many whom that finding did not convince, who read
+my lord too well, and would never suffer him to reap the fruits
+of his evil deed. Prominent among these were Arundel--who himself
+had aimed at the Queen's hand--Norfolk and Pembroke, and behind
+them was a great mass of the people. Indignation against Lord
+Robert was blazing out, fanned by such screaming preachers as
+Lever, who, from the London pulpits, denounced the projected
+marriage, hinting darkly at the truth of Amy Dudley's death.
+
+What was hinted at home was openly expressed abroad, and in Paris
+Mary Stuart ventured a cruel witticism that Elizabeth was to
+conserve in her memory: "The Queen of England," she said, "is
+about to marry her horse-keeper, who has killed his wife to make
+a place for her."
+
+Yet Elizabeth persisted in her intent to marry Dudley, until the
+sober Cecil conveyed to her towards the end of that month of
+September some notion of the rebellion that was smouldering.
+
+She flared out at him, of course. But he stood his ground.
+
+"There is," he reminded her, "this unfortunate matter of a
+prophecy, as the Bishop of Aquila persists in calling it."
+
+"God's Body! Is the rogue blabbing?"
+
+"What else did your Majesty expect from a man smarting under a
+sense of injury? He has published it broadcast that on the day
+before Lady Robert broke her neck, you told him that she was dead
+or nearly so. And he argues from it a guilty foreknowledge on
+your Majesty's part of what was planned."
+
+"A guilty foreknowledge!" She almost choked in rage, and then
+fell to swearing as furiously in that moment as old King Harry at
+his worst.
+
+"Madame!" he cried, shaken by her vehemence. "I but report the
+phrase he uses. It is not mine."
+
+"Do you believe it?"
+
+"I do not, madame. If I did I should not be here at present."
+
+"Does any subject of mine believe it?"
+
+"They suspend their judgment. They wait to learn the truth from
+the sequel."
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"That if your motive prove to be such as de Quadra and others
+allege, they will be in danger of believing."
+
+"Be plain, man, in God's name. What exactly is alleged?"
+
+He obeyed her very fully.
+
+"That my lord contrived the killing of his wife so that he might
+have liberty to marry your Majesty, and that your Majesty was
+privy to the deed." He spoke out boldly, and hurried on before
+she could let loose her wrath. "It is still in your power,
+madame, to save your honour, which is now in peril. But there is
+only one way in which you can accomplish it. If you put from you
+all thought of marrying Lord Robert, England will believe that de
+Quadra and those others lied. If you persist and carry out your
+intention, you proclaim the truth of his report; and you see what
+must inevitably follow."
+
+She saw indeed, and, seeing, was afraid.
+
+Within a few hours of that interview she delivered her answer to
+Cecil, which was that she had no intention of marrying Dudley.
+
+Because of her fear she saved her honour by sacrificing her
+heart, by renouncing marriage with the only man she could have
+taken for her mate of all who had wooed her. Yet the wound of
+that renunciation was slow to heal. She trifled with the notion
+of other marriages, but ever and anon, in her despair, perhaps,
+we see her turning longing eyes towards the handsome Lord Robert,
+later made Earl of Leicester. Once, indeed, some six years after
+Amy's death, there was again some talk of her marrying him, which
+was quickly quelled by a reopening of the question of how Amy
+died. Between these two, between the fulfilment of her desire and
+his ambition, stood the irreconcilable ghost of his poor murdered
+wife.
+
+Perhaps it was some thought of this that found expression in her
+passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's
+child: "The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but
+a barren stock."
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. SIR JUDAS
+
+The Betrayal of Sir Walter Ralegh
+
+
+
+Sir Walter was met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred
+voyage to El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural,
+seeing that Sir Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but
+also Sir Walter's very good friend and kinsman.
+
+If Sir Walter doubted whether it was in his quality as kinsman or
+as Vice-Admiral that Sir Lewis met him, the cordiality of the
+latter's embrace and the noble entertainment following at the
+house of Sir Christopher Hare, near the port, whither Sir Lewis
+conducted him, set this doubt at rest and relighted the lamp of
+hope in the despairing soul of our adventurer. In Sir Lewis he
+saw only his kinsman--his very good friend and kinsman, to insist
+upon Stukeley's own description of himself--at a time when of all
+others in his crowded life he needed the support of a kinsman and
+the guidance of a friend.
+
+You know the story of this Sir Walter, who had been one of the
+brightest ornaments of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and might
+have added lustre to that of King James, had not his Sowship--to
+employ the title bestowed upon that prince by his own queen--been
+too mean of soul to appreciate the man's great worth. Courtier,
+philosopher, soldier, man of letters and man of action alike,
+Ralegh was at once the greatest prose-writer, and one of the
+greatest captains of his age, the last survivor of that glorious
+company--whose other members were Drake and Frobisher and
+Hawkins--that had given England supremacy upon the seas, that had
+broken the power and lowered the pride of Spain.
+
+His was a name that had resounded, to the honour and glory of
+England, throughout the world, a name that, like Drake's, was a
+thing of hate and terror to King Philip and his Spaniards; yet
+the King of Scots, unclean of body and of mind, who had succeeded
+to the throne of Elizabeth, must affect ignorance of that great
+name which shall never die while England lives.
+
+When the splendid courtier stood before him--for at fifty Sir
+Walter was still handsome of person and magnificent of Apparel--
+James looked him over and inquired who he might be. When they had
+told him:
+
+"I've rawly heard of thee," quoth the royal punster, who sought
+by such atrocities of speech to be acclaimed a wit.
+
+It was ominous of what must follow, and soon thereafter you see
+this great and gallant gentleman arrested on a trumped-up charge
+of high treason, bullied, vituperated, and insulted by venal,
+peddling lawyers, and, finally, although his wit and sincerity
+had shattered every fragment of evidence brought against him,
+sentenced to death. Thus far James went; but he hesitated to go
+further, hesitated to carry out the sentence. Sir Walter had too
+many friends in England then; the memory of his glorious deeds
+was still too fresh in the public mind, and execution might have
+been attended by serious consequences for King James. Besides,
+one at least of the main objects was achieved. Sir Walter's broad
+acres were confiscate by virtue of that sentence, and King James
+wanted the land--filched thus from one who was England's pride--
+to bestow it upon one of those golden calves of his who were
+England's shame.
+
+"I maun hae the land for Carr. I maun hae it," was his brazen and
+peevish answer to an appeal against the confiscation.
+
+For thirteen years Sir Walter lay in the Tower, under that
+sentence of death passed in 1603, enjoying after a season a
+certain liberty, visited there by his dear lady and his friends,
+among whom was Henry, Prince of Wales, who did not hesitate to
+publish that no man but his father--whom he detested--would keep
+such a bird in a cage. He beguiled the time in literary and
+scientific pursuits, distilling his essences and writing that
+stupendous work of his, "The History of the World." Thus old age
+crept upon him; but far from quenching the fires of enterprise
+within his adventurer's soul, it brought a restlessness that
+urged him at last to make a bid for liberty. Despairing of
+winning it from the clemency of James, he applied his wits to
+extracting it from the King's cupidity.
+
+Throughout his life, since the day when first he had brought
+himself to the notice of a Queen by making of his cloak a carpet
+for her feet, he had retained side by side with the dignity of
+the sage and the greatness of the hero, the craft and opportunism
+of the adventurer. His opportunity now was the straitened
+condition of the royal treasury, a hint of which had been let
+fall by Winwood the Secretary of State. He announced at once that
+he knew of a gold mine in Guiana, the El Dorado of the Spaniards.
+
+On his return from a voyage to Guiana in 1595, he had written of
+it thus:
+
+"There the common soldier shall fight for gold instead of pence,
+pay himself with plates half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his
+bones in other wars for provant and penury Those commanders and
+chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find here
+more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden
+images, more sepulchres filled with treasure than either Cortez
+found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru."
+
+Winwood now reminded him that as a consequence many expeditions
+had gone out, but failed to discover any of these things.
+
+"That," said Ralegh, "is because those adventurers were ignorant
+alike of the country and of the art of conciliating its
+inhabitants. Were I permitted to go, I would make Guiana to
+England what Peru has been to Spain."
+
+That statement, reported to James in his need, was enough to fire
+his cupidity, and when Ralegh had further added that he would
+guarantee to the Crown one-fifth of the treasure without asking
+any contribution towards the adventure either in money or in
+ships, he was permitted to come forth and prepare for the
+expedition.
+
+
+His friends came to his assistance, and in March of 1617 he set
+sail for E1 Dorado with a well-manned and wellequipped fleet of
+fourteen ships, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke standing
+sureties for his return.
+
+From the outset the fates were unpropitious. Disaster closed the
+adventure. Gondomar, the Ambassador of Spain at Whitehall, too
+well-informed of what was afoot, had warned his master. Spanish
+ships waited to frustrate Sir Walter, who was under pledge to
+avoid all conflict with the forces of King Philip. But conflict
+there was, and bloodshed in plenty, about the city of Manoa,
+which the Spaniards held as the key to the country into which the
+English adventurers sought to penetrate. Among the slain were the
+Governor of Manoa, who was Gondomar's own brother, and Sir
+Walter's eldest son.
+
+To Ralegh, waiting at the mouth of the Orinoco, came his beaten
+forces in retreat, with the terrible news of a happening that
+meant his ruin. Half-maddened, his anguish increased by the loss
+of his boy, he upbraided them so fiercely that Keymis, who had
+been in charge of the expedition, shut himself up in his cabin
+and shot himself with a pocket-pistol. Mutiny followed, and
+Whitney--most trusted of Sir Walter's captains--set sail for
+England, being followed by six other ships of that fleet, which
+meanwhile had been reduced to twelve. With the remaining five the
+stricken Sir Walter had followed more at leisure. What need to
+hurry? Disgrace, and perhaps death, awaited him in England. He
+knew the power of Spain with James, who was so set upon a Spanish
+marriage for his heir, knew Spain's hatred of himself, and what
+eloquence it would gather in the mouth of Gondomar, intent upon
+avenging his brother's death.
+
+He feared the worst, and so was glad upon landing to have by him
+a kinsman upon whom he could lean for counsel and guidance in
+this the darkest hour of all his life. Sitting late that night in
+the library of Sir Christopher Hare's house, Sir Walter told his
+cousin in detail the story of his misadventure, and confessed to
+his misgivings.
+
+"My brains are broken," was his cry.
+
+Stukeley combed his beard in thought. He had little comfort to
+offer.
+
+"It was not expected," said he, "that you would return.
+
+"Not expected?" Sir Walter's bowed white head was suddenly flung
+back. Indignation blazed in the eyes that age had left undimmed.
+"What act in all my life justified the belief I should be false
+to honour? My danger here was made quite plain, and Captain King
+would have had me steer a course for France, where I had found a
+welcome and a harbour. But to consent I must have been false to
+my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who were sureties to the King
+for my return. Life is still sweet to me, despite my three-score
+years and more, but honour is sweeter still."
+
+And then, because life was sweet, he bluntly asked his cousin:
+"What is the King's intent by me?"
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley, "who shall know what passes in the
+King's mind? From the signs, I judge your case to be none so
+desperate. You have good friends in plenty, among whom, although
+the poorest, count myself the first. Anon, when you are rested,
+we'll to London by easy stages, baiting at the houses of your
+friends, and enlisting their good offices on your behalf."
+
+Ralegh took counsel on the matter with Captain King, a bluff,
+tawny-bearded seaman, who was devoted to him body and soul.
+
+"Sir Lewis proposes it, eh?" quoth the hardy seaman. "And Sir
+Lewis is Vice-Admiral of Devon? He is not by chance bidden to
+escort you to London?"
+
+The Captain, clearly, had escaped the spell of Stukeley's
+affability. Sir Walter was indignant. He had never held his
+kinsman in great esteem, and had never been on the best of terms
+with him in the past. Nevertheless, he was very far from
+suspecting him of what King implied. To convince him that he did
+Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt question to his
+kinsman in King's presence.
+
+"Nay," said Sir Lewis, "I am not yet bidden to escort you. But as
+Vice-Admiral of Devon I may at any moment be so bidden. It were
+wiser, I hold, not to await such an order. Though even if it
+come," he made haste to add, "you may still count upon my
+friendship. I am your kinsman first, and Vice-Admiral after."
+
+With a smile that irradiated his handsome, virile countenance,
+Sir Walter held out his hand to clasp his cousin's in token of
+appreciation. Captain King expressed no opinion save what might
+be conveyed in a grunt and a shrug.
+
+Guided now unreservedly by his cousin's counsel, Sir Walter set
+out with him upon that journey to London. Captain King went with
+them, as well as Sir Walter's body-servant, Cotterell, and a
+Frenchman named Manourie, who had made his first appearance in
+the Plymouth household on the previous day. Stukeley explained
+the fellow as a gifted man of medicine, whom he had sent for to
+cure him of a trivial but inconvenient ailment by which he was
+afflicted.
+
+Journeying by slow stages, as Sir Lewis had directed, they came
+at last to Brentford. Sir Walter, had he followed his own bent,
+would have journeyed more slowly still, for in a measure, as he
+neared London, apprehensions of what might await him there grew
+ever darker. He spoke of them to King, and the blunt Captain said
+nothing to dispel them.
+
+"You are being led like a sheep to the shambles," he declared,
+"and you go like a sheep. You should have landed in France, where
+you have friends. Even now it is not too late. A ship could be
+procured . . ."
+
+"And my honour could be sunk at sea," Sir Walter harshly
+concluded, in reproof of such counsel.
+
+But at the inn at Brentford he was sought out by a visitor, who
+brought him the like advice in rather different terms. This was
+De Chesne, the secretary of the French envoy, Le Clerc. Cordially
+welcomed by Ralegh, the Frenchman expressed his deep concern to
+see Sir Walter under arrest.
+
+"You conclude too hastily," laughed Sir Walter.
+
+"Monsieur, I do not conclude. I speak of what I am inform'."
+
+"Misinformed, sir. I am not a prisoner--at least, not yet," he
+added, with a sigh. "I travel of my own free will to London with
+my good friend and kinsman Stukeley to lay the account of my
+voyage before the King."
+
+"Of your own free will? You travel of your own frets will? And
+you are not a prisoner? Ha !" There was bitter mockery in De
+Chesne's short laugh. "C'est bien drole!" And he explained:
+"Milord the Duke o Buckingham, he has write in his master's name
+to the ambassador Gondomar that you are taken and held at the
+disposal of the King of Spain. Gondomar is to inform him whether
+King Philip wish that you be sent to Spain to essay the justice
+of his Catholic Majesty, or that you suffer here. Meanwhile your
+quarters are being made ready in the Tower. Yet you tell me you
+are not prisoner! You go of your own free will to London. Sir
+Walter, do not be deceive'. If you reach London, you are lost."
+
+Now here was news to shatter Sir Walter's last illusion. Yet
+desperately he clung to the fragments of it. The envoy's secretary
+must be at fault.
+
+"'Tis yourself are at fault, Sir Walter, in that you trust those
+about you," the Frenchman insisted.
+
+Sir Walter stared at him, frowning. "D'ye mean Stukeley?" quoth
+he, half-indignant already at the mere suggestion.
+
+"Sir Lewis, he is your kinsman." De Chesne shrugged. "You should
+know your family better than I. But who is this Manourie who
+accompanies you? Where is he come from? What you know of him?"
+
+Sir Walter confessed that he knew nothing.
+
+"But I know much. He is a fellow of evil reputation. A spy who
+does not scruple to sell his own people. And I know that letters
+of commission from the Privy Council for your arrest were give'
+to him in London ten days ago. Whether those letters were to
+himself, or he was just the messenger to another, imports
+nothing. The fact is everything. The warrant against you exists,
+and it is in the hands of one or another of those that accompany
+you. I say no more. As I have tol' you, you should know your own
+family. But of this be sure, they mean that you go to the Tower,
+and so to your death. And now, Sir Walter, if I show you the
+disease I also bring the remedy. I am command' by my master to
+offer you a French barque which is in the Thames, and a safe
+conduct to the Governor of Calais. In France you will find safety
+and honour, as your worth deserve'."
+
+Up sprang Sir Walter from his chair, and flung off the cloak of
+thought in which he had been mantled.
+
+"Impossible," he said. "Impossible! There is my plighted word to
+return, and there are my Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, who are
+sureties for me. I cannot leave them to suffer by my default."
+
+"They will not suffer at all," De Chesne assured him. He was very
+well informed. "King James has yielded to Spain partly because he
+fears, partly because he will have a Spanish marriage for Prince
+Charles, and will do nothing to trouble his good relations with
+King Philip. But, after all, you have friends, whom his Majesty
+also fears. If you escape' you would resolve all his perplexities.
+I do not believe that any obstacle will be offer' to your escape--
+else why they permit you to travel thus without any guard, and to
+retain your sword?"
+
+Half distracted as he was by what he had learnt, yet Sir Walter
+clung stoutly and obstinately to what he believed to be the only
+course for a man of honour. And so he dismissed De Chesne with
+messages of gratitude but refusal to his master, and sent for
+Captain King. Together they considered all that the secretary had
+stated, and King agreed with De Chesne's implied opinion that it
+was Sir Lewis himself who held the warrant.
+
+They sent for him at once, and Ralegh straightly taxed him with
+it. Sir Lewis as straightly admitted it, and when King thereupon
+charged him with deceit he showed no anger, but only the
+profoundest grief. He sank into a chair, and took his head in his
+hands.
+
+"What could I do? What could I do?" he cried. "The warrant came
+in the very moment we were setting out. At first I thought of
+telling you; and then I bethought me that to do so would be but
+to trouble your mind, without being able to offer you help."
+
+Sir Walter understood what was implied. "Did you not say," he
+asked, "that you were my kinsman first and Vice-Admiral of Devon
+after?"
+
+"Ay--and so I am. Though I must lose my office of Vice-Admiral,
+which has cost me six hundred pounds, if I suffer you to escape,
+I'd never hesitate if it were not for Manourie, who watches me as
+closely as he watches you, and would baulk us at the last. And
+that is why I have held my peace on the score of this warrant.
+What can it help that I should trouble you with the matter until
+at the same time I can offer you some way out?"
+
+"The Frenchman has a throat, and throats can be slit," said the
+downright King.
+
+"So they can; and men can be hanged for slitting them," returned
+Sir Lewis, and thereafter resumed and elaborated his first
+argument, using now such forceful logic and obvious sincerity
+that Sir Walter was convinced. He was no less convinced, too, of
+the peril in which he stood. He plied those wits of his, which
+had rarely failed him in an extremity. Manourie was the
+difficulty. But in his time he had known many of these agents
+who, without sentimental interest and purely for the sake of
+gold, were ready to play such parts; and never yet had he known
+one who was not to be corrupted. So that evening he desired
+Manourie's company in the room above stairs that had been set
+apart for Sir Walter's use. Facing him across the table at which
+both were seated, Sir Walter thrust his clenched fist upon the
+board, and, suddenly opening it, dazzled the Frenchman's beady
+eyes with the jewel sparkling in his palm.
+
+"Tell me, Manourie, are you paid as much as that to betray me?"
+
+Manourie paled a little under his tan. He was a swarthy, sharp-
+featured fellow, slight and wiry. He looked into Sir Walter's
+grimly smiling eyes, then again at the white diamond, from which
+the candlelight was striking every colour of the rainbow. He made
+a shrewd estimate of its price, and shook his black head. He had
+quite recovered from the shock of Sir Walter's question.
+
+"Not half as much," he confessed, with impudence.
+
+"Then you might find it more remunerative to serve me," said the
+knight. "This jewel is to be earned."
+
+The agent's eyes flickered; he passed his tongue over his lips.
+"As how?" quoth he.
+
+"Briefly thus: I have but learnt of the trammel in which I am
+taken. I must have time to concert my measures of escape, and
+time is almost at an end. You are skilled in drugs, so my kinsman
+tells me. Can you so drug me as to deceive physicians that I am
+in extremis?"
+
+Manourie considered awhile.
+
+"I . . . I think I could," he answered presently.
+
+"And keep faith with me in this, at the price of, say .. two such
+stones?"
+
+The venal knave gasped in amazement. This was not generosity; it
+was prodigality. He recovered again, and swore himself Sir
+Walter's.
+
+"About it, then." Sir Walter rolled the gem across the board into
+the clutch of the spy, which pounced to meet it. "Keep that in
+earnest. The other will follow when we have cozened them."
+
+Next morning Sir Walter could not resume the journey. When
+Cotterell went to dress him he found his master taken with
+vomits, and reeling like a drunkard. The valet ran to fetch Sir
+Lewis, and when they returned together they found Sir Walter on
+all fours gnawing the rushes on the floor, his face livid and
+horribly distorted, his brow glistening with sweat.
+
+Stukeley, in alarm, ordered Cotterell to get his master back to
+bed and to foment him, which was done. But on the next day there
+was no improvement, and on the third things were in far more
+serious case. The skin of his brow and arms and breast was
+inflamed, and covered with horrible purple blotches--the result
+of an otherwise harmless ointment with which the French empiric
+had supplied him.
+
+When Stukeley beheld him thus disfigured, and lying apparently
+inert and but half-conscious upon his bed, he backed away in
+terror. The Vice-Admiral had seen afore-time the horrible
+manifestations of the plague, and could not be mistaken here. He
+fled from the infected air of his kinsman's chamber, and summoned
+what physicians were available to pronounce and prescribe. The
+physicians came--three in number--but manifested no eagerness to
+approach the patient closely. The mere sight of him was enough to
+lead them to the decision that he was afflicted with the plague
+in a singularly virulent form.
+
+Presently one of them plucked up courage so far as to feel the
+pulse of the apparently delirious patient. Its feebleness
+confirmed his diagnosis; moreover the hand he held was cold and
+turgid. He was not to know that Sir Walter had tightly wrapped
+about his upper arm the ribbon from his poniard, and so he was
+entirely deceived.
+
+The physicians withdrew, and delivered their verdict, whereupon
+Sir Lewis at once sent word of it to the Privy Council.
+
+That afternoon the faithful Captain King, sorely afflicted by the
+news, came to visit his master, and was introduced to Sir Walter's
+chamber by Manourie, who was in attendance upon him. To the seaman's
+amazement he found Sir Walter sitting up in bed, surveying in a
+hand-mirror a face that was horrible beyond description with the
+complacent smile of one who takes satisfaction in his appearance.
+Yet there was no fevered madness in the smiling eyes. They were
+alive with intelligence, amounting, indeed, to craft.
+
+"Ah, King!" was the glad welcome "The prophet David did make
+himself a fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his beard, to
+escape from the hands of his enemies And there was Brutus, ay,
+and others as memorable who have descended to such artifice."
+
+Though he laughed, it is clear that he was seeking to excuse an
+unworthiness of which he was conscious.
+
+"Artifice?" quoth King, aghast. "Is this artifice?"
+
+"Ay--a hedge against my enemies, who will be afraid to approach
+me."
+
+King sat himself down by his master's bed. "A better hedge
+against your enemies, Sir Walter, would have been the strip of
+sea 'twixt here and France. Would to Heaven you had done as I
+advised ere you set foot in this ungrateful land."
+
+"The omission may be repaired," said Sir Walter.
+
+Before the imminence of his peril, as now disclosed to him, Sir
+Walter had been reconsidering De Chesne's assurance touching my
+Lords of Arundel and Pembroke, and he had come to conclude--the
+more readily, perhaps because it was as he would have it--that De
+Chesne was right; that to break faith with them were no such
+great matter after all, nor one for which they would be called
+upon to suffer. And so, now, when it was all but too late, he
+yielded to the insistence of Captain King, and consented to save
+himself by flight to France. King was to go about the business of
+procuring a ship without loss of time. Yet there was no need of
+desperate haste, as was shown when presently orders came to
+Brentford for the disposal of the prisoner. The King, who was at
+Salisbury, desired that Sir Walter should be conveyed to his own
+house in London. Stukeley reported this to him, proclaiming it a
+sign of royal favour. Sir Walter was not deceived. He knew the
+reason to be fear lest he should infect the Tower with the plague
+by which he was reported stricken.
+
+So the journey was resumed, and Sir Walter was brought to London,
+and safely bestowed in his own house, but ever in the care of his
+loving friend and kinsman. Manourie's part being fulfilled and
+the aim accomplished, Sir Walter completed the promised payment
+by bestowing upon him the second diamond--a form of eminently
+portable currency with which the knight was well supplied. On the
+morrow Manourie was gone, dismissed as a consequence of the part
+he had played.
+
+It was Stukeley who told Sir Walter this--a very well informed
+and injured Stukeley, who asked to know what he had done to
+forfeit the knight's confidence that behind his back Sir Walter
+secretly concerted means of escape. Had his cousin ceased to
+trust him?
+
+Sir Walter wondered. Looking into that lean, crafty face, he
+considered King's unquenchable mistrust of the man, bethought him
+of his kinsman's general neediness, remembered past events that
+shed light upon his ways and nature, and began now at last to have
+a sense of the man's hypocrisy and double-dealing. Yet he reasoned
+in regard to him precisely as he had reasoned in regard to Manourie.
+The fellow was acquisitive, and therefore corruptible. If, indeed,
+he was so base that he had been bought to betray Sir Walter, then
+he could be bought again to betray those who had so bought him.
+
+"Nay, nay," said Sir Walter easily. "It is not lack of trust in
+you, my good friend. But you are the holder of an office, and
+knowing as I do the upright honesty of your character I feared to
+embarrass you with things whose very knowledge must give you the
+parlous choice of being false to that office or false to me."
+
+Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the
+most accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this
+should have fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too,
+he would have his cousin remember. It was unthinkable that he
+should use the knowledge he had gained to attempt to frustrate
+Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this notwithstanding
+that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose his
+office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had paid for
+it.
+
+"As to that, you shall be at no loss," Sir Walter assured him. "I
+could not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you
+shall have a thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am
+safely landed in France or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what
+is to come, here is a toy of value for you." And he presented Sir
+Lewis with a jewel of price, a great ruby encrusted in diamonds.
+
+Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir
+Lewis was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir
+Walter's plans, and to render him all possible assistance. True,
+this assistance was a costly matter; there was this person to be
+bought and that one; there were expenses here and expenses there,
+incurred by Sir Lewis on his kinsman's behalf; and there were odd
+presents, too, which Stukeley seemed to expect and which Sir
+Walter could not deny him. He had no illusions now that King had
+been right; that here he was dealing with a rogue who would exact
+the uttermost farthing for his services, but he was gratified at
+the shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's measure, and
+did not grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the scaffold.
+
+De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his
+master's offer of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such
+other assistance as Sir Walter might require But by now the
+knight's arrangements were complete. His servant Cotterell had
+come to inform him that his own boatswain, now in London, was the
+owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury, admirably suited
+for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's disposal. It had
+been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King, that they
+should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell was
+bidden desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea
+at once. In view of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily
+compromising the French envoy, Sir Walter gratefully declined the
+latter's offer.
+
+And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the
+flight. Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of
+Manourie's ointment, had practically recovered his normal
+appearance, covering his long white hair under a Spanish hat, and
+muffling the half of his face in the folds of a cloak, came to
+Wapping Stairs--that ill-omened place of execution of pirates and
+sea-rovers--accompanied by Cotterell, who carried the knight's
+cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son. Out of
+solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could
+not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage.
+At the head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the
+foot of them a boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at
+the tiller.
+
+King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
+
+"You feared perhaps we should not come," said Stukeley, with a
+sneer at the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. "Yet now, I trust,
+you'll do me the justice to admit that I have shown myself an
+honest man."
+
+The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the
+words.
+
+"I hope that you'll continue so," he answered stiffly.
+
+They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore
+glided slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the
+ebbing tide.
+
+A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-
+out, observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher
+up the river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if
+proceeding towards London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and
+follow them. Instantly he drew the attention of Sir Walter to
+that pursuing wherry.
+
+"What's this?" quoth Sir Walter harshly. "Are we betrayed?"
+
+The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their
+oars.
+
+"Put back," Sir Walter bade them. "I'll not betray my friends to
+no purpose. Put back, and let us home again."
+
+"Nay, now," said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry.
+"We are more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose
+be such as you suspect--for which suspicion, when all is said,
+there is no ground. On then!" He addressed himself to the
+watermen, whipping out a pistol, and growing truculent in mien
+and voice. "To your oars! Row, you dogs, or I'll pistol you where
+you sit."
+
+The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But
+Sir Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the
+wisdom of keeping to their down-stream course if they were being
+followed.
+
+"But are we followed?" cried the impatient Sir Lewis. "'Sdeath,
+cousin, is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and
+must every wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us?
+If you are to halt at every shadow, faith, you'll never
+accomplish anything. I vow I am unfortunate in having a friend
+whom I would save so full of doubts and fears."
+
+Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that
+he had suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under
+Stukeley's suasion, now threw themselves heartily into their
+task, and onward sped the boat through the deepening night,
+taking but little account of that other wherry that hung ever in
+their wake. In this wise they came at length to Greenwich on the
+last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning to grow
+against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's
+enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring
+that they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
+
+Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade
+them put him ashore at Purfleet.
+
+"And that's the soundest counsel," quoth the boatswain. "For at
+Purfleet we can get horses on to Tilbury."
+
+Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical
+Captain King.
+
+"'Tis useless," he declared to them. "At this hour how shall you
+get horses to go by land?"
+
+And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other
+wherry bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent
+mists of dawn. A hail came to them across the water.
+
+"Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!" cried Ralegh bitterly, and
+Stukeley swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him.
+"Put ashore," he said shortly, "and let us home."
+
+"Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the
+enterprise, and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be
+said to me for this active assistance in your escape?" His voice
+was gloomy, his face drawn and white.
+
+"Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to
+seize on my private papers?" suggested the ingenious mind of
+Ralegh.
+
+"I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?" His loom was
+deepening to despair.
+
+Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account.
+His generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his
+friends than with his own doom. He desired to make amends to
+Stukeley, but had no means save such as lay in the power of that
+currency he used. Having naught else to give, he must give that.
+He plunged his hand into an inner pocket, and brought forth a
+handful of jewels, which he thrust upon his kinsman.
+
+"Courage," he urged him. "Up now, and we may yet win out and
+home, so that all will be well with you at least, and you shall
+not suffer for your friendship to me."
+
+Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to
+serve him.
+
+They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and
+almost at the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately
+above them. Men sprang from her, with the obvious intent of
+cutting off their retreat.
+
+"Too late!" said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion
+now that the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost.
+"You must act on my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis."
+
+"Indeed, there is no other course," Sir Lewis agreed. "And you are
+in the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined
+with me but to betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each
+supporting the other . . ."
+
+"I'll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor," roared the
+Captain furiously. "And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld
+understand my meaning."
+
+"So, so?" said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was
+observed that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken
+their stand beside him as if in readiness for action. "Why, then,
+since you will have it so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King's
+name, on a charge of abetting treason."
+
+The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer
+amazement. Then he groped for a pistol to do at last what he
+realized he should have done long since. Instantly he was
+overpowered. It was only then that Sir Walter understood the
+thing that had happened, and with understanding came fury. The
+old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his rapier
+to put it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But
+he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held
+by the men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert,
+whom he knew for Stukeley's cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert
+formally asking him for the surrender of his sword.
+
+Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked
+coldly at his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the
+growing light of the early summer dawn "Sir Lewis," was all he
+said, "these actions will not turn out to your credit."
+
+He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full
+one. His dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout,
+intending first to drain him of his resources before finally
+flinging the empty husk to the executioner. Manourie had been in
+the plot; he had run with the hare and hunted with the hounds;
+and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had done no less. Amongst
+them they had "cozened the great cozener"--to use Stukeley's own
+cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial that Sir
+Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it was
+only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant
+of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might
+the more effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter
+discovered also that the ship in which he had landed, and other
+matters, were to provide additional Judas' fees to this
+acquisitive betrayer.
+
+If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices
+unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost
+he conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond
+equal. So calm and self-possessed and masterly was his defence
+from the charge of piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and
+so shrewd in its inflaming appeal to public opinion, that his
+judges were constrained to abandon that line of prosecution, and
+could discover no way of giving his head to King James save by
+falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence of death against
+him. Of this they now ordered execution.
+
+Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it
+met death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with
+that elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He
+wore a ruff band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a
+doublet of hair-coloured satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black
+cut taffety breeches and ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his
+plumed hat he covered his white locks with a wrought nightcap.
+This last he bestowed on his way to the scaffold upon a bald-
+headed old man who had come to take a last look of him, with the
+observation that he was more in need of it than himself. When he
+had removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as
+usual. This was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the
+prison of the Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir
+Walter had put him off with a laugh and a jest.
+
+"Let them comb it that shall have it," he had said of his own
+head.
+
+Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him
+with the observation that he had a long journey before him, he
+called for the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers
+along the edge, and smiled.
+
+"Sharp medicine," quoth he, "but a sound cure for all diseases."
+
+When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the
+East:
+
+"It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his
+heart lies right," he said.
+
+Thus passed one of Englanl's greatest heroes, indeed one of the
+very makers of this England, and than his death there is no more
+shameful blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous
+James, unclean of body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the
+King of Spain.
+
+A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words--as men must
+ever suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth--declared that
+England had not such another head to cut off.
+
+As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of
+him was destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely
+forthcoming for knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught
+diminishing the gold coin of the realm by the operation known to-
+day as "clipping," and with him was taken his creature Manourie,
+who, to save himself, turned chief witness against Stukeley. Sir
+Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself by purchasing his
+pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he possessed, and
+he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of honour.
+
+Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir
+Walter Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration
+throughout the land, and to be commonly known as "Sir Judas." At
+Whitehall he suffered rebuffs and insults that found a climax in
+the words addressed to him by the Lord Admiral, to whom he went
+to give an account of his office.
+
+"Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men
+offer thyself in my presence?"
+
+For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a
+man of honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered
+at him.
+
+"What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On
+my soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the
+trees of the country would not suffice, so great is the number."
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
+
+George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria
+
+
+
+He was Insolence incarnate.
+
+Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks
+had attracted the attention of King James--notoriously partial to
+good-looking lads--and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to
+his Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a
+series of acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance,
+expressing the vanity and levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely
+was he established in the royal favour than he distinguished
+himself by striking an offending gentleman in the very presence
+of his sovereign--an act of such gross disrespect to royalty that
+his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded, had not the
+maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly
+maimed.
+
+Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
+greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were
+easy to show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the
+main planks of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles
+Stuart came to lose his head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a
+martyr chiefly to the reckless, insolent, irresponsible vanity of
+this Villiers, who, from a simple country squire with nothing but
+personal beauty to recommend him, had risen to be, as Duke of
+Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
+
+The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it
+that, as John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch
+of craziness in him--of the variety, no doubt, known to modern
+psychologists as megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and
+was without respect for anybody or anything. The Commons of
+England and the immensely dignified Court of Spain--during that
+disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at Madrid--were alike the
+butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But the crowning
+insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act of
+which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the
+banks of the river Somme.
+
+Three weeks ago--on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise--Buckingham
+had arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with
+the task of conducting to England the King of France's sister,
+Henrietta Maria, who three days earlier had been married by proxy
+to King Charles.
+
+The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck
+of his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy
+passion for ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of
+France was proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury,
+Buckingham felt it due to himself to extinguish its brilliance by
+his own. On his first coming to the Louvre he literally blazed.
+He wore a suit of white satin velvet with a short cloak in the
+Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with diamonds to the
+value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond clasped
+the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of his
+sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten
+gold; the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on
+his breast. On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of
+purple satin, of intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he
+moved he shook them off like raindrops, and left them to lie
+where they fell, as largesse for pages and the lesser fry of the
+Court.
+
+His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
+effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with
+cloth of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train.
+There were musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty
+chief yeomen, a score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages,
+two dozen footmen, six outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with
+his own attendants, all arrayed as became the satellites of a
+star of such great magnitude.
+
+Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had
+set the fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the
+splendour of this superb and scintillating ambassador.
+
+Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut,
+might have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent
+assurance was proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied,
+he was conscious only that what he did could not be better done,
+and he ruffled it with an air of easy insouciance, as if in all
+this costly display there was nothing that was not normal. He
+treated with princes, and even with the gloomy Louis XIII., as
+with equals; and, becoming more and more intoxicated with his
+very obvious success, he condescended to observe approvingly the
+fresh beauty of the young Queen.
+
+Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be
+one of the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good
+height and carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a
+ravishing fairness of skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness
+had come to invest with an indefinable tenderness her splendid
+eyes. Her childless marriage to the young King of France, which
+had endured now for ten years, had hardly been successful.
+Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and difficult to
+convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof, throwing up
+between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of dislike.
+
+There is a story--and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it--
+that in the early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu
+had fallen deeply in love with her, and that she, with the
+mischief of an irresponsible young girl, had encouraged him,
+merely to betray him to a ridicule which his proud spirit had
+never been able to forgive. Be that or another the reason, the
+fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected her to his
+vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who by a
+hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King's mind, and
+thus kept ever open the gulf between the two.
+
+The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and
+admiration kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling
+figure of my Lord of Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a
+figure of romance, a prince out of a fairy-tale.
+
+That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his
+monstrous arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of
+his vanity he would add that of the love of a beautiful young
+queen. Perhaps he was thrilled in his madness by the thought of
+the peril that would spice such an adventure. Into that adventure
+he plunged forthwith. He wooed her during the eight days that he
+abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly, contemptuous of courtiers and
+of the very King himself. At the Louvre, at the Hotel de
+Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother held her
+Court, at the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the
+Queen's side.
+
+Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the
+Duke's cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart,
+and may even have resented that so shallow a man should have been
+sent to treat with a statesman of his own caliber--for other
+business beside the marriage had brought Buckingham to Paris--
+suggested to the King that the Duke's manner in approaching the
+Queen lacked a proper deference, and the Queen's manner of
+receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore the King's long
+face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he looked on.
+Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl was
+mere incense to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on
+to greater daring.
+
+On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand
+French nobles and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue,
+quitted Paris to accompany Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England,
+on the first stage of her journey to her new home. The King was
+not of the party. He had gone with Richelieu to Fontainebieau,
+leaving it to the Queen and the Queen-Mother to accompany his
+sister.
+
+Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his
+attentions upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place
+should be beside the carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did
+not apply to His Insolence of Buckingham, so indifferent of whom
+he might slight or offend. And then the devil took a hand in the
+game.
+
+At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was
+compelled to halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the
+repose she required. Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the
+presence of three queens at one and the same time within its
+walls, the Duc de Chaulnes gave an entertainment in the Citadel.
+Buckingham attended this, and in the dance that followed the
+banquet it was Buckingham who led out the Queen.
+
+Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop's Palace,
+where it was lodged, and a small company went out to take the
+evening cool in the Bishop's fragrant gardens on the Somme,
+Buckingham ever at the Queen's side. Anne of Austria was attended
+by her Mistress of the Household, the beautiful, witty Marie de
+Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, and by her equerry, Monsieur de
+Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for cavalier that handsome
+coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of Buckingham's creatures,
+between whom and herself a certain transient tenderness had
+sprung up. M. de Putange was accompanied by Madame de Vernet,
+with whom at the time he was over head and ears in love.
+Elsewhere about the spacious gardens other courtiers sauntered.
+
+Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply
+engrossed in their respective companions, or else the state of
+their own hearts and the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them
+complacently towards the affair of gallantry upon which their
+mistress almost seemed to wish to be embarked. They forgot, it
+would seem, that she was a queen, and remembered sympathetically
+that she was a woman, and that she had for companion the most
+splendid cavalier in all the world. Thus they committed the
+unpardonable fault of lagging behind, and allowing her to pass
+out of their sight round the bend of an avenue by the water.
+
+No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the
+Queen, that the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them
+from observation, than, piling audacity up on audacity, he
+determined to accomplish here and now the conquest of this lovely
+lady who had used him so graciously and received his advances
+with such manifest pleasure.
+
+"How soft the night! How exquisite!" he sighed.
+
+"Indeed," she agreed. "And how still, but for the gentle murmur
+of the river."
+
+"The river!" he cried, on a new note. "That is no gentle murmur.
+The river laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil."
+
+"Evil?" quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now
+side by side.
+
+"Evil," he repeated. "Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea
+that soon shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing
+wickedly in the pain that will presently be mine."
+
+It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide
+her discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew
+whether she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment
+upon that royal aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her
+Spanish rearing had taught her she must ever dwell.
+
+
+"Oh, but Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, you will be with us again,
+perhaps before so very long."
+
+His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near
+her face that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
+
+"Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your
+pity, say but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear
+down half a world to reach you."
+
+She recoiled in Wright and displeasure before a wooing so
+impetuous and violently outspoken; though the displeasure was
+perhaps but a passing emotion, the result of early training. Yet
+she contrived to answer him with the proper icy dignity due to
+her position as a princess of Spain, now Queen of France.
+
+"Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not
+listen to such words. You are mad, I think."
+
+"Yes, I am mad," he flung back. "Mad with love--so mad that I
+have forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the
+ambassador there is a man, under the queen a woman--our real
+selves, not the titles with which Fate seeks to dissemble our
+true natures. And with the whole strength of my true nature do I
+love you, so potently, so overwhelmingly that I will not believe
+you sensible of no response."
+
+Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little
+off her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true;
+but also a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever
+addressed her in anything approaching this manner, no one had
+ever so much as suggested that her existence could matter
+greatly, that in her woman's nature there was the magic power of
+awakening passion and devotion. He was so splendidly magnificent,
+so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus to lay his being,
+as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a little, who
+knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to repulse
+him, and the effort was not very convincing.
+
+"Hush, monsieur, for pity's sake! You must not talk so to me. It
+. . . it hurts."
+
+O fatal word! She meant that it was her dignity as Queen he
+wounded, for she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But
+he in his egregious vanity must of cours e misunderstand.
+
+"Hurts!" he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have
+warned her. "Because you resist it, because you fight against the
+commands of your true self. Anne!" He seized her, and crushed her
+to him. "Anne!"
+
+Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger,
+too, her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A
+scream, loud and piercing, broke from her and rang through the
+still garden. It brought him to his senses. It was as if he had
+been lifted up into the air, and then suddenly allowed to fall.
+
+He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips,
+and when an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in
+alarm, his hand upon his sword, those two stood with the width of
+the avenue between them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen
+breathing hard and trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as
+if to repress its tumult.
+
+"Madame! Madame!" had been Putange's cry, as he sprang forward in
+alarm and self-reproach.
+
+He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other
+in bewilderment. Neither spoke.
+
+"You cried out, Madame," M. de Putange reminded her, and
+Buckingham may well have wondered whether presently he would be
+receiving M. de Putange's sword in his vitals. He must have known
+that his life now hung upon her answer.
+
+"I called you, that was all," said the Queen, in a voice that she
+strove to render calm. "I confess that I was startled to find
+myself alone with M. I'Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again,
+M. de Putange!"
+
+The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from
+his sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions
+as to what must have happened. But he was relieved there were to
+be no complications. The others now coming up with them, the
+party thereafter kept together until presently Buckingham and
+Lord Holland took their leave.
+
+On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was
+accomplished. A little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave
+of Henrietta Maria, entrusting her now to Buckingham and his
+followers, who were to convey her safely to Charles.
+
+It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to
+Anne of Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de
+Conti for only companion.
+
+"Madame," he said, "I am come to take my leave."
+
+"Fare you well, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur," she said, and her voice
+was warm and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
+
+"I am come to ask your pardon, madame," he said, in a low voice.
+
+"Oh, monsieur--no more, I beg you." She looked down; her hands
+were trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
+
+He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none
+might see him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld
+tears in his eyes.
+
+"Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for
+having discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were
+idle to ask pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I
+can help drawing breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the
+will to live. I gave expression to something that dominates my
+whole being, and will ever dominate it as long as I have life.
+Adieu, madame! At need you know where a servant who will gladly
+die for you is to be found." He kissed the hem of her robe,
+dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and was gone before
+she could say a word in answer.
+
+She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti,
+watching her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
+
+"I will answer for the Queen's virtue," she stated afterwards,
+"but I cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart,
+since without doubt the Duke's tears affected her spirits."
+
+But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he
+was met by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him
+regarding the negotiations he had been empowered to carry out
+with France in the matter of an alliance against Spain--
+negotiations which had not thriven with Louis and Richelieu,
+possibly because the ambassador was ill-chosen. The instructions
+came too late to be of use, but in time to serve as a pretext for
+Buckingham's return to Amiens. There he sought an audience of the
+Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a futile message
+for the King. This chimerical business--as Madame de Motteville
+shrewdly calls it--being accomplished, he came to the real matter
+which had prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and
+sought audience of Anne of Austria.
+
+It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the
+levées at the Court of France were precisely what the word
+implies, and they were held by royalty whilst still abed. It was
+not, therefore, amazing that he should have been admitted to her
+presence. She was alone save for her lady-in-waiting, Madame de
+Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged, prudent and virtuous.
+Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of this lady upon
+seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into the room,
+and on his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and bear
+it to his lips.
+
+Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de
+Lannoi became a pillar of icy dignity.
+
+"M. le Duc," says she, "it is not customary in France to kneel
+when speaking to the Queen."
+
+"I care nothing for the customs of France, madame" he answered
+rudely. "I am not a Frenchman."
+
+"That is too obvious, monsieur," snapped the elderly, prudent and
+virtuous countess. "Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps
+monsieur will perceive the convenience of conforming to French
+customs. Let me call for a chair for Monsieur le Duc."
+
+"I do not want a chair, madame."
+
+The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, "I suppose
+one cannot expect anything else in a foreigner," and let him
+kneel as he insisted, placing herself, however, protectingly at
+the Queen's pillow.
+
+Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi's
+presence no more than if she had been part of the room's
+furniture, the Duke delivered himself freely of what was in his
+mind. He had been obliged to return to Amiens on a matter of
+State. It was unthinkable that he should be so near to her
+Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her feet; and whilst
+gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her matchless
+perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of his
+soul, allow himself the only felicity life now held for him--that
+of protesting himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the
+kind, did he pour out, what time the Queen, embarrassed and
+annoyed beyond utterance, could only stare at him in silence.
+
+Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a
+rashness beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most
+circumspect of women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and
+for the King's ears, a tale that must hopelessly compromise the
+Queen. For that, Buckingham, in his self-sufficiency and
+arrogance, appears to have cared nothing. One suspects that it
+would have pleased his vanity to have his name linked with the
+Queen's by the lips of scandal.
+
+She found her tongue at last.
+
+"Monsieur le Duc," she said in her confusion, "it was not
+necessary, it was not worth while, to have asked audience of me
+for this. You have leave to go."
+
+He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it
+perhaps to the presence of that third party to which himself he
+had been so indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled
+to his feet, and reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming
+glance of his bold eyes, and hand on heart--
+
+"Adieu, madame!" said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
+
+Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of
+what had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself
+had taken place under such conditions was enough to set the
+tongue of gossip wagging. An echo of it reached the King,
+together with the story of that other business in the garden, and
+he was glad to know that the Duke of Buckingham was back in
+London. Richelieu, to vent his own malice against the Queen,
+sought to feed the King's suspicions.
+
+"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
+Buckingham do to make her cry out?"
+
+"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since
+she did cry out."
+
+Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
+abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he
+desired of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's
+movements, and the fullest particulars of his private life.
+
+Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful
+agents of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green
+with the Queen. For he intended to return upon one pretext or
+another before very long, and complete the conquest. Those agents
+of his were Lord Holland and the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is
+to be presumed that they served the Duke's interests well, and it
+is no less to be presumed from that which followed that they
+found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly
+romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life,
+touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
+loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in
+which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was
+away, overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there
+could be little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had
+inspired.
+
+So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--
+as La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the
+Duke a trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That
+love-token--for it amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to
+England, and delivered to the Duke.
+
+Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his
+desire to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so
+overmastering, that he at once communicated to France that he was
+coming over as the ambassador of the King of England to treat of
+certain masters connected with Spain. But Richelieu had heard
+from the French ambassador in London that portraits of the Queen
+of France were excessively abundant at York House, the Duke's
+residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform the King.
+Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
+guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride
+too deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an
+expression of Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition,
+a form of vain, empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
+
+As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke
+of Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be
+agreeable as Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty.
+Upon learning this, the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in
+proclaiming the reason ("well known to himself") and in
+protesting that he would go to France to see the Queen with the
+French King's consent or without it. This was duly reported to
+Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most Christian
+Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on the
+part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
+
+Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King
+who was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him,
+that when considered in addition to his undying rancour against
+Anne of Austria, it is easily believed he spared no pains to
+obtain something in the nature of a proof that the Queen was not
+as innocent as Louis insisted upon believing.
+
+Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among
+other matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had
+a bitter and secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between
+whom and himself there had been a passage of some tenderness too
+abruptly ended by the Duke. Richelieu, acting upon this
+information, contrived to enter into correspondence with Lady
+Carlisle, and in the course of this correspondence he managed her
+so craftily--says La Rochefoucauld--that very soon she was,
+whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most valuable spy near
+Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly concerned
+with information that would throw light upon the real relations
+of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her that
+nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
+of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment
+the more bitter for being stifled--since for her reputation's
+sake she dared not have given it expression--made her a very
+ready instrument in Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of
+gossip she did not carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But
+all was naught until one day at last she was able to tell him
+something that set his pulses beating more quickly than their
+habit.
+
+She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
+constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the
+Queen of France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her
+own. Here, indeed, was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen
+might be destroyed. Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain
+possession of the studs, the rest would be easy. There would be
+an end--and such an end!--to the King's obstinate, indolent faith
+in his wife's indifference to that boastful, flamboyant English
+upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being, and wrote
+to the Countess.
+
+Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at
+York House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young
+French Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the
+evening Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful,
+accomplished and ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found
+her charms so alluring that he was almost disposed to blame
+himself for having perhaps treated her too lightly. Yet she
+seemed at pains to show him that it was his to take up again the
+affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She was gay,
+arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that presently,
+yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
+guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the
+foot of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo
+Jones had just completed for him. My lady languished at his side,
+permitted him to encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a
+moment lay heavily against him. He caught her violently to him,
+and now her ladyship, hitherto so yielding, with true feminine
+contrariness set herself to resist him. A scuffle ensued between
+them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift as a doe across
+the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his Grace in
+pursuit between vexation and amusement.
+
+But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having
+been fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could
+discern her nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that
+she had desired her carriage to be called, and had left York
+House immediately upon coming in from the garden.
+
+He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It
+was, in fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have
+taken offense at that which she had so obviously invited. But
+then she always had been a perverse and provoking jade. With that
+reflection he put her from his mind.
+
+But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the
+great house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident
+again. Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his
+fine, pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-
+laugh, he rose to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him,
+and brought in his valet from an adjoining room. The riband of
+diamond studs was gone.
+
+Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in
+the moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there
+pale, staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There
+were upon his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one
+of which could have been more easily detached. This was the work
+of some French agent. He had made no secret of whence those studs
+had come to him.
+
+There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of
+revelation, he saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly
+contradictory behaviour. The jade had fooled him. It was she who
+had stolen the riband. He sat down again, his head in his hands,
+and swiftly, link by link, he pieced together a complete chain.
+
+Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he
+must adopt so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was
+virtually the ruler of England, master in these islands of an
+almost boundless power. That power he would exert to the full
+this very night to thwart those enemies of his own and of the
+Queen's, who worked so subtly in concert. Many would be wronged,
+much harm would be done, the liberties of some thousands of
+freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot. What did it
+matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should
+cover up an indiscretion.
+
+"Set ink and paper yonder," he bade his gaping valet. "Then go
+call M. Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at
+once, and leave word that I shall require a score of couriers to
+be in the saddle and ready to set out in half an hour."
+
+Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down
+to write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the
+ports of England were closed by the King's express command--
+delivered by his minister, the Duke of Buckingham--that measures
+were being taken--were already taken in all southern ports--so
+that no vessel of any kind should leave the island until the
+King's further pleasure were made known. Startled, the people
+wondered was this enactment the forerunner of war. Had they known
+the truth, they might have been more startled still, though in a
+different manner. As swiftly as couriers could travel--and
+certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape overseas--
+did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were tight
+locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs whirls meant
+the honour of the Queen of France.
+
+And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones
+by others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to
+say which were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and
+Gerbier between them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished,
+and a vessel slipped down the Thames, allowed to pass by those
+who kept close watch to enforce the royal decree, and made sail
+for Calais, which was beginning to manifest surprise at this
+entire cessation of traffic from England. From that vessel landed
+Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying the Queen of France
+the duplicate studs, which were to replace those which she had
+sent to Buckingham.
+
+Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and
+commerce was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-
+four hours too late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of
+Carlisle. His Eminence deplored a fine chance lost through the
+excessive power that was wielded in England by the parvenu.
+
+Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed
+and reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object
+of his desires--go to France and see the Queen. Since the country
+was closed to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of
+war. Blood should flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in
+the end he would go to Paris to negotiate a peace, and that
+should be his opportunity. Other reasons there may have been, but
+none so dominant, none that could not have been remved by
+negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the matter of the
+Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against their
+king.
+
+To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition.
+Disaster and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back
+in disgrace to England, and the Duke found himself more detested
+by the people than he had been already--which is saying much. He
+went off to seek comfort at the hands of the two persons who
+really loved him--his doting King and his splendid wife.
+
+But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
+insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
+long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies
+and mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a
+nation? He desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to
+accomplish that he nothing recked that he should set Europe in a
+blaze, nothing recked what blood should be poured out, what
+treasure dissipated.
+
+Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his
+friends, fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds,
+urged him to take precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of
+mail for greater safety.
+
+But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
+
+"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his
+contemptuous answer.
+
+He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
+the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
+superintending the final preparations for that unpopular
+expedition, John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national
+vengeance, drove a knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.
+
+"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation
+with which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances,
+there seems to have been occasion for the prayer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
+
+The Fall of Lord Clarendon
+
+
+
+Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black
+winter's night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years,
+picked his way carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the
+jetty by the light of a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on
+crushed brown seaweed and trailing green sea slime. Leaning
+heavily upon the arm which a sailor held out to his assistance,
+he stepped into the waiting boat that rose and fell on the
+heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the stones, and
+the frail craft was pushed off.
+
+The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
+steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were
+swinging rhythmically high up against the black background of the
+night. The elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets,
+looked behind him--to look his last upon the England he had loved
+and served and ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow
+light upon the jetty steps, was all of it that he could now see.
+
+He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights,
+dancing there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to
+carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of
+England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened
+vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde--whose career had
+reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of
+death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere
+endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in
+the Temple when Charles I. was King.
+
+That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
+desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to
+place the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in
+Sir Edward Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels.
+The present was not to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He
+had known it, and of a bitter sort, in those impecunious days
+when the Second Charles, whose steps he guided, was a needy,
+homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal might have thrown
+over so profitless a service. He had talents that would have
+commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly adhering
+to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly in the
+Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
+achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the
+Throne of England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours
+in exile on the Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time
+was that James Stuart, Duke of York, debauched his daughter.
+
+Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the
+Restoration; it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was
+accomplished, took in hand and carried out the difficult task of
+welding together the old and the new conditions of political
+affairs. And it was Hyde who was the scapegoat when things did
+not run the course that Englishmen desired. As the head of the
+administration he was held responsible even for those acts which
+he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde who
+was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the
+money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen
+was childless.
+
+The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to
+Hyde's daughter Anne had now been righted by marri age with the
+Duke of York. Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the
+people, ever ready to attach most credit to that which is most
+incredible and fantastic, believed that to ensure the succession
+of his own grandchildren Hyde had deliberately provided Charles
+with a barren wife.
+
+When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war
+at Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde
+was openly denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with
+terror and seeking a victim in the blind, unreasoning way of
+public feeling. They broke his windows, ravaged his garden, and
+erected a gibbet before the gates of his superb mansion on the
+north side of Piccadilly.
+
+Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
+commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those
+qualities of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the
+masses. Nor did he court popularity elsewhere. Because he was
+austere in his morals, grave and sober in his conduct, he was
+hated by those who made up the debauched court of his prince.
+Because he was deeply religious in his principles, the Puritans
+mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was autocratic in his
+policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of autocracy being
+done.
+
+Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles
+been half as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles.
+For a time, it is true, the King stood his friend, and might so
+have continued to the end had not the women become mixed up in
+the business. As Evelyn, the diarist, puts it, this great man's
+fall was the work of "the buffoones and ladys of pleasure."
+
+It really is a very tangled story--this inner history of the fall
+of Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a
+sense, it is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine
+of Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have
+suffered as much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country
+where the seraglio is not a natural and proper institution.
+
+If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the
+marriage, at least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by
+Portugal, which was anxious to establish an alliance with England
+as some protection against the predatory designs of Spain. He had
+been influenced by the dowry offered--five hundred thousand
+pounds in money, Tangier, which would give England a commanding
+position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of Bombay. Without
+yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the freedom to
+trade in the East Indies--which Portugal had hitherto kept
+jealously to herself--were to enable England to build up her
+great Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were
+obvious enough to make the match desirable.
+
+Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May,
+1662, Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his
+bride at Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall--
+he stood a full six feet high--lean and elegantly vigorous. The
+ugliness of his drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the
+glory of full, low-ridded, dark eyes, and his smile could be
+irresistibly captivating. He was as graceful in manner as in
+person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent good temper that
+found expression in a charming urbanity.
+
+Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the
+wife they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth
+year, was of an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and
+short in the legs that, dressed as she was in an outlandish,
+full-skirted farthingale, she had the appearance of being on her
+knees when she stood before him. Her complexion was sallow, and
+though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not fine
+enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair
+was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great
+ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a
+pair of miniature wings.
+
+It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious
+voluptuary, with his nice discernment in women, should have
+checked in his long stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
+
+"Lord!" was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him.
+"They've brought me a bat, not a woman."
+
+But if she lacked beauty, she was well cowered, and Charles was
+in desperate need of money.
+
+"I suppose," he told Clarendon anon, "I must swallow this black
+draught to get the jam that goes with it."
+
+The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what
+time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did
+riot presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would
+he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a
+sycophant.
+
+Catherine was immediately attended--in the words of Grammont--by
+six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a
+governess who was a monster. With this retinue she repaired to
+Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was spent, and where for a
+brief season the poor woman--entirely enamoured of the graceful,
+long-legged rake she had married--lived in a fool's paradise.
+
+Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace
+of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that
+to King Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives
+de facto Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him;
+and the present wife defacto, the mistress of his heart, the
+first lady of his harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara
+Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-
+maine.
+
+There was no lack--there never is in such cases--of those who out
+of concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil
+for her, and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's
+association with my Lady Castle-maine--an association dating back
+to the time when he was still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge
+would appear to have troubled the poor soul profoundly; but the
+climax of her distress was reached when, on her coming to
+Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of ladies-in-waiting
+assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The forlorn
+little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
+that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not
+to be admitted to her presence.
+
+But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-
+tempered, debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his
+nature, manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this
+situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the
+hand into his wife's presence, before the whole Court assembled,
+and himself presented her to Catherine, what time that Court,
+dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so
+outrageous a slight to the dignity of a queen.
+
+What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
+stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually
+her face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged
+pride and mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if
+something snapped within her brain under this stress of bitter
+emotion, blood gushed from her nostrils, and she sank back in a
+swoon into the arms of her Portuguese ladies.
+
+Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light
+of love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy
+skill in handling delicate situations could avail him to save his
+royal dignity.
+
+Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was
+his wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established
+as one of the Queen's ladies--or, rather, since it was her
+ladyship's wish, and since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's
+hands--it became necessary to have the Queen instructed in what
+was, in her husband's view, fitting. For this task he selected
+Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long and loyally played
+Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide him in
+matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.
+
+Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated
+with Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his
+Majesty was bent.
+
+"Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who
+shall not be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel
+at her decision in this instance."
+
+"Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be
+revoked."
+
+"By whom, sire?" the Chancellor asked him gravely.
+
+"By her Majesty, of course."
+
+"Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument," said
+Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from
+the latter's boyhood. "Yourself, sire, at a time when your own
+wishes did not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing
+that now you are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your
+cousin, King Louis, for thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon
+his queen. You will not have forgotten the things you said then
+of King Louis."
+
+Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
+invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting
+himself in check.
+
+But anon--no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my
+Lady Castlemaine--he returned to the attack, and sent the
+Chancellor his orders in a letter demanding unquestioning
+obedience.
+
+"Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I
+am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find
+to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise
+upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He
+knew his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a
+variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter
+draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon.
+Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen
+that bitter, threatening line: "Whosoever I find to be my Lady
+Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to
+be his enemy so long as I live."
+
+All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing
+unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded.
+All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be
+swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.
+
+Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that
+odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of
+sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious
+to the Queen than to himself.
+
+That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr.
+Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following
+day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between
+the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so
+stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the
+neighbouring chambers.
+
+You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
+Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
+husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
+affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
+Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant
+whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-
+nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally threatening
+her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to
+Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he
+thrust upon her here.
+
+Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail,
+prevail it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and
+submitted. And a very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine
+was not only installed as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon
+we find the Queen treating her with a friendliness that provoked
+comment and amazement.
+
+The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
+insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor,
+of whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was
+aware. Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful
+bitterness that is inseparable from the nature of such women. And
+she hated him the more because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he
+moved in utter unconcern of her hostility. In this hatred she
+certainly did not lack for allies, members of that licentious
+court whose hostility towards the austere Chancellor was begotten
+of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked to pull him
+down.
+
+The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving
+vain--for Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the
+Chancellor's value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously
+and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the
+public ignorance--most fruitful soil for scandal against the
+great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were
+responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord
+Clarendon's gatepost:
+
+                    Three sights to be seen:
+             Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
+
+Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
+Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as
+stable as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was,
+it follows that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious
+jealousies to mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her
+how insecure is the tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the
+mercy of the very caprice to existence.
+
+And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for
+her, a day when she found herself bereft of her influence with
+her royal lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway
+him. In part she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in
+far greater measure to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed,
+fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still found
+pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and
+lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by
+the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was
+become the toast of the day.
+
+This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre,
+newly come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How
+profound an impression her beauty made upon the admittedly
+impressionable old Pepys you may study in his diary. He had a
+glimpse of her one day riding in the Park with the King, and a
+troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine, looking, as he
+tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when Miss
+Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
+she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found
+its way into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more
+perdurable than that of any actual queen) in the figure of
+Britannia, for which she was the model.
+
+Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study
+appearances in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became
+customary in that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at
+Whitehall to inquire whether he were above or below--"below"
+meaning Miss Stewart's apartments on the ground-floor of the
+palace, in which apartments his Majesty was a constant visitor.
+And since where the King goes the Court follows, and where the
+King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted that this child
+now found herself queering it over a court that flocked to her
+apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
+gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
+
+About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
+iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with
+curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one
+night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there
+into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached out for cards, or
+for a share of the heaps of gold that swept this way and that
+with the varying fortunes of the game.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester,
+played in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had
+lost, it is true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal
+gamester, and one who came easily by money, she had been known to
+lose ten times that sum and yet preserve her smile. The source of
+her ill-humour was not the game. She played recklessly, her
+attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers were
+intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long
+room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
+gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a
+vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only
+purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and
+here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants,
+and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who
+was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms of
+architecture.
+
+Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather,
+lounged the King, languidly observing this smaller party, a
+faint, indolent smile o n his swarthy, saturnine countenance.
+Absently, with one hand he stroked a little spaniel that was
+curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous, plumed turban and a
+long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold--there were three or
+four such attendants about the room--proffered him a cup of
+posses on a golden salver.
+
+The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his
+spaniel under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table.
+Soon he found himself alone with her--the others having removed
+themselves on his approach, as jackals fall back before the
+coming of the lion. The last to go, and with signs of obvious
+reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond, a delicately-built,
+uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
+
+Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards
+standing between them.
+
+Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
+architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled
+down to a mere heap of cards again.
+
+"Symbol of kingly power," said Miss, pertly. "You demolish better
+than you build, sire."
+
+"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,"
+quoth he.
+
+"Pray do. The cards are here."
+
+"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But
+such is not the castle I'll build you if you command me."
+
+"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
+surely."
+
+"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes
+were oddly ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"
+
+Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
+distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
+
+"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen
+must prove a prison."
+
+She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome,
+scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine
+looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her." She
+was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double
+meaning to her speech. "Shall we go see how she is faring?" she
+added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also
+doubted.
+
+He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially
+with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic
+urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was
+no more than a mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that
+pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him
+and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly
+simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.
+
+"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
+prove a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to
+queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?
+
+It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew
+there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon,
+which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the
+grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of
+Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the King's divorce.
+
+It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be
+largely responsible for the existence of that party. In her
+hatred for Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would
+slay the Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least
+helped to give currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had
+deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure
+the ultimate succession of his own daughter's children. But she
+had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now
+did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in
+consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very
+moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
+artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
+
+It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that
+party's mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as
+perhaps it did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed.
+He looked at Buckingham, frowning.
+
+"I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England."
+
+The impudent gallant made a leg. "For a subject, sire, I believe
+I am."
+
+Charles--with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
+compelling than the serious--laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then
+he sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
+
+"It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only
+because she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no
+fault of hers."
+
+He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature
+shrank from purchasing his desires at the price of so much
+ignominy to the Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be
+necessary to give the screw of temptation another turn or two.
+And it was Miss Stewart herself who--in all innocence--supplied
+what was required in that direction. Driven to bay by the
+importunities of Charles, she announced at last that it was her
+intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve herself from
+the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine the
+uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
+occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so
+desperate had she been rendered that she would marry any
+gentleman of fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have her in
+honour.
+
+You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to
+bribe her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or
+any title she coveted, offering her these things at the nation's
+expense as freely and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into
+her lap, or the collar of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he
+had put about her neck. The offers were ineffectual, and Charles,
+driven almost to distraction by such invulnerable virtue, might
+now have yielded to the insidious whispers of divorce and re-
+marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the game.
+
+Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
+infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
+a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered
+with bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the
+Chancellor had recoiled upon herself.
+
+In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost
+dead, she made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the
+ineffable Chiffinch, Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-
+Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio, who was her ladyship's friend, made
+it and communicated it to her There had been one ardent
+respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that proclamation of Miss
+Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
+pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here his
+opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in
+constant attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared
+the King's displeasure.
+
+My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well
+served in the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came
+one cold night towards the end of February of that year 1667.
+Charles, going below at a late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when
+he judged that she would be alone, was informed by her maid that
+Miss was not receiving, a headache compelling her to keep her
+room.
+
+His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
+confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine.
+Chiffinch had introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles
+stiffened at sight of her.
+
+"I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage," says she, on a note
+of irony, "although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me
+at my own house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction
+and grief into which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman
+Stewart has reduced your Majesty."
+
+"You are pleased to be amused, ma'am," says Charles frostily.
+
+"I will not," she returned him, "make use of reproaches which
+would disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse
+frailties in myself which nothing can justify, since your
+constancy for me deprives me of all defence." Her ladyship, you
+see, had a considerable gift of sarcasm.
+
+"In that case, may I ask you why you have come?"
+
+"To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made
+the jest of your own Court."
+
+"Madam!"
+
+"Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at
+for the gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the
+Stewart's affectations, any more than you know that whilst you
+are denied admittance to her apartments, under the presence of
+some indisposition, the Duke of Richmond is with her now."
+
+"That is false," he was beginning, very indignantly.
+
+"I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow
+me, you will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes
+you act so ridiculous a part."
+
+She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence
+led him, despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately
+come. Outside her rival's door she left him, but she paused at
+the end of the gallery to make sure that he had entered.
+
+Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
+chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them
+informing him scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been
+very ill since his Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she
+was, God be thanked, in a very fine sleep.
+
+"That I must see," said the King. And, since one of the women
+placed herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty
+unceremoniously took her by the shoulders and put her aside.
+
+He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony
+into the well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the
+handsome, canopied bed. But far from being as he had been told,
+in "a very fine sleep," she was sitting up; and far from
+presenting an ailing appearance, she looked radiantly well and
+very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with golden
+ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
+sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved
+upon scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.
+
+The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid
+eyes lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might
+have expected that he would now deliver himself with that
+sneering sarcasm, that indolent cynicism, which he used upon
+occasion. But he was too deeply stirred for acting. His self-
+control deserted him entirely. Exactly what he said has not been
+preserved for us. All that we are told is that he signified his
+resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and that
+his Grace, almost petrified by the King's most royal rage,
+uttered never a word in answer. The windows of the room
+overlooked the Thames. The King's eyes strayed towards them.
+Richmond was slight of build, Charles vigorous and athletic. His
+Grace took the door betimes lest the window should occur to his
+Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with the outraged monarch.
+
+Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss
+Stewart faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own,
+and she was very far from attempting any such justification of
+herself, or her conduct, as he may have expected.
+
+"Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your
+complaint?" she invited him challengingly.
+
+That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn.
+His jaw fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this
+she took the fullest advantage.
+
+"If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
+Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am
+a slave in a free country. I know of no engagement that should
+prevent me from disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this
+is not permitted me in your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe
+there is any power on earth can prevent me going back to France,
+and throwing myself into a convent, there to enjoy the peace
+denied me at this Court."
+
+With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was
+complete. On his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury
+he had done her. But Miss was not in a forgiving humour.
+
+"If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in
+peace," said she, "you would avoid offending by a longer visit
+those who accompanied or conducted you to my apartments."
+
+She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went
+home Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak
+to her again, he stalked out.
+
+Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he
+must also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and
+that in his conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely
+ridiculous. She was rightly resolved against being lightly worn
+by any man. If anything, the reflection must have fanned his
+passion. It was impossible, he thought, that she should love that
+knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no graces either of body or
+of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit, it must be, as she
+had all but said, so that she might be delivered from the
+persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought
+of her marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to
+Charles, and it may have stifled his last scruple in the matter
+of the divorce.
+
+His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the
+Court. But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The
+King's messenger found him gone already.
+
+Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
+Clarendon's habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke
+to the King--taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary
+position in which for the last twenty-five years he had stood to
+him--much as he had spoken when Charles had proposed to make
+Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, saving that he
+was now even more uncompromising. The King was not pleased with
+him. But just as he had had his way, despite the Chancellor, in
+that other matter, so he would have his way despite him now.
+This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too
+much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no
+effort to avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured
+Queen. So he went secretly to work to outwit the King. He made
+himself the protector of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and
+Miss Stewart, with the result that one dark night, a week or two
+later, the lady stole away from the Palace of White-hall, and
+made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the Bridge-foot, Westminster,
+where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And so, by the secret
+favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent and
+matrimony.
+
+That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of
+things in his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks
+later that he learnt by whose agency the thing had been
+accomplished. He learnt it, not a doubt, from my Lady
+Castlemaine.
+
+The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated
+back to the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was
+at last made up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant,
+and firmly established in the amorous King's affections. She had
+cause to be grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her
+vindictive nature remembered only the earlier injury still
+unavenged. Here at last was her chance to pay off that score.
+Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand, yet trusting in the
+King whom he had served so well, stood his ground unintimidated
+and unmoved--an oak that had weathered mightier storms than this.
+He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil woman. And
+that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told the
+King of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest
+the King should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of
+consideration for his motives, represented him as a self-seeker,
+and charged him with having acted thus so as to make sure of
+keeping his daughter's children by the Duke of York in the
+succession.
+
+That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw
+Clarendon to the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him
+with a command that he should surrender his seals of office. The
+proud old man refused to yield his seals to any but the King
+himself. He may have hoped that the memory of all that lay
+between them would rise up once more when they were face to face.
+So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
+deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile
+throng of courtiers--"especially the buffoones and ladys of
+pleasure," as Evelyn says.
+
+Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has
+left us a vivid picture:
+
+"When he went from the King on Monday morning my Lady Castlemaine
+was in bed (though about twelve o'clock), and ran out in her
+smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall Gardens; and thither
+her woman brought her her nightgown; and she stood, blessing
+herself at the old man's going away; and several of the gallants
+of Whitehall--of which there were many staying to see the
+Chancellor's return--did talk to her in her birdcage; among
+others Blandford, telling her she was the bird of passage."
+
+Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine
+house in Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered
+Strafford's fate, and set out to tread once more and for the
+remainder of his days the path of exile.
+
+Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--
+reigned successively as queens in England.
+
+
+
+
+
+X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN
+
+Count Philip Königsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea
+
+
+
+He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
+particularly in England, where he had been associated with his
+brother in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century
+did not look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of
+fortune; and so it condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip
+Christof Königsmark for the sake of his personal beauty, his
+elegance, his ready wit, and his magnificent address. The court
+of Hanover made him warmly welcome, counting itself the richer
+for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was retained there by
+the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he had been
+appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
+Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who
+later was to reign in England as King George I.
+
+His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had
+been playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where
+Königsmark had been brought up. With adolescence he had gone out
+into the world to seek the broader education which it offered to
+men of quality and spirit. He had fought bulls in Madrid, and the
+infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure wherever it was to be
+met, until romance hung about him like an aura. Thus Sophia met
+him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence shone the
+more brightly against the dull background of that gross
+Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of
+the world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.
+
+The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a
+different kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been
+married in 1682, at the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years
+of wedded life to the fulfilment of the handsome promise of her
+maidenhood. But her beauty was spiritualized by a certain
+wistfulness that had not been there before, that should not have
+been there now had all been well. The sprightliness inherent in
+her had not abated, but it had assumed a certain warp of
+bitterness; humour, which is of the heart, had given place in her
+to wit, which is of the mind, and this wit was barbed, and a
+little reckless of how or where it offended.
+
+Königsmark observed these changes that the years had wrought, and
+knew enough of her story to account for them. He knew of her
+thwarted love for her cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, thwarted
+for the sake of dynastic ambition, to the end that by marrying
+her to the Electoral Prince George the whole of the Duchy of
+Luneberg might be united. Thus, for political reasons, she had
+been thrust into a union that was mutually loveless; for Prince
+George had as little affection to bring to it as herself. Yet for
+a prince the door to compensations is ever open. Prince George's
+taste, as is notorious, was ever for ugly women, and this taste
+he indulged so freely, openly, and grossly that the coldness
+towards him with which Sophia had entered the alliance was
+eventually converted into disgust and contempt.
+
+Thus matters stood between that ill-matched couple; contempt on
+her side, cold dislike on his, a dislike that was fully shared by
+his father, the Elector, Ernest Augustus, and encouraged in the
+latter by the Countess von Platen.
+
+Madame von Platen, the wife of the Elector's chief minister of
+state, was--with the connivance of her despicable husband, who
+saw therein the means to his own advancement--the acknowledged
+mistress of Ernest Augustus. She was a fleshly, gauche, vain, and
+ill-favoured woman. Malevolence sat in the creases of her painted
+face, and peered from her mean eyes. Yet, such as she was, the
+Elector Ernest loved her. His son's taste for ugly women would
+appear to have been hereditary.
+
+Between the Countess and Sophia there was a deadly feud. The
+princess had mortally offended her father-in-law's favourite. Not
+only had she never troubled to dissemble the loathing which that
+detestable woman inspired in her, but she had actually given it
+such free and stinging expression as had provoked against Madame
+von Platen the derision of the court, a derision so ill-concealed
+that echoes of it had reached its object, and made her aware of
+the source from whence it sprang.
+
+It was into this atmosphere of hostility that the advent of the
+elegant, romantic Königsmark took place. He found the stage set
+for comedy of a grim and bitter kind, which he was himself, by
+his recklessness, to convert into tragedy.
+
+It began by the Countess von Platen's falling in love with him.
+It was some time before he suspected it, though heaven knows he
+did not lack for self-esteem. Perhaps it was this very self-
+esteem that blinded him here to the appalling truth. Yet in the
+end understanding came to him. When the precise significance of
+the fond leer of that painted harridan's repellent coquetry was
+borne in upon him he felt the skin of his body creep and roughen
+But he dissembled craftily. He was a venal scamp, after all, and
+in the court of Hanover he saw opportunities to employ his gifts
+and his knowledge of the great world in such a way as to win to
+eminence. He saw that the Elector's favourite could be of use to
+him; and it is not your adventurer's way to look too closely into
+the nature of the ladder by which he has the chance to climb.
+
+Skilfully, craftily, then, he played the enamoured countess so
+long as her fondness for him might be useful, her hostility
+detrimental. But once the Colonelcy of the Electoral Guards was
+firmly in his grasp, and an intimate friendship had ripened
+between himself and Prince Charles--the Elector's younger son--
+sufficiently to ensure his future, he plucked off the mask and
+allied himself with Sophia in her hostility towards Madame von
+Platen. He did worse. Some little time thereafter, whilst on a
+visit to the court of Poland, he made one night in his cups a
+droll story of the amorous persecution which he had suffered at
+Madame von Platen's hands.
+
+It was a tale that set the profligate company in a roar. But
+there was one present who afterwards sent a report of it to the
+Countess, and you conceive the nature of the emotions it aroused
+in her. Her rage was the greater for being stifled. It was
+obviously impossible for her to appeal to her lover, the Elector,
+to avenge her. From the Elector, above all others, must the
+matter be kept concealed. But not on that account would she forgo
+the vengeance due. She would present a reckoning in full ere all
+was done, and bitterly should the presumptuous young adventurer
+who had flouted her be made to pay.
+
+The opportunity was very soon to be afforded her. It arose more
+or less directly out of an act in which she indulged her spite
+against Sophia. This lay in throwing Melusina Schulemberg into
+the arms of the Electoral Prince. Melusina, who was years
+afterwards to be created Duchess of Kendal, had not yet attained
+to that completeness of lank, bony hideousness that was later to
+distinguish her in England. But even in youth she could boast of
+little attraction. Prince George, however, was easily attracted.
+A dull, undignified libertine, addicted to over-eating, heavy
+drinking, and low conversation, he found in Melusina von
+Schulemberg an ideal mate. Her installation as maîtresse en-titre
+took place publicly at a ball given by Prince George at
+Herrenhausen, a ball at which the Princess Sophia was present.
+
+Accustomed, inured, as she was to the coarse profligacy of her
+dullard husband, and indifferent to his philandering as her
+contempt of him now left her, yet in the affront thus publicly
+offered her, she felt that the limit of endurance had been
+reached. Next day it was found that she had disappeared from
+Herrenhausen. She had fled to her father's court at Zell.
+
+But her father received her coldly; lectured her upon the freedom
+and levity of her manners, which he condemned as unbecoming the
+dignity of her rank; recommended her to use in future greater
+prudence, and a proper, wifely submission; and, the homily
+delivered, packed her back to her husband at Herrenhausen.
+
+George's reception of her on her return was bitterly hostile. She
+had been guilty of a more than usual, of an unpardonable want of
+respect for him. She must learn what was due to her station, and
+to her husband. He would thank her to instruct herself in these
+matters against his return from Berlin, whither he was about to
+journey, and he warned her that he would suffer no more tantrums
+of that kind.
+
+Thus he delivered himself, with cold hate in his white, flabby,
+frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ungainly figure.
+
+Thereafter he departed for Berlin, bearing hate of her with him,
+and leaving hate and despair behind.
+
+It was then, in this despair, that Sophia looked about her for a
+true friend to lend her the aid she so urgently required; to
+rescue her from her intolerable, soul-destroying fate. And at her
+elbow, against this dreadful need, Destiny had placed her
+sometime playmate, her most devoted friend--as she accounted
+him, and as, indeed, he was--the elegant, reckless Königsmark,
+with his beautiful face, his golden mane, and his unfathomable
+blue eyes.
+
+Walking with him one summer day between clipped hedges in the
+formal gardens of Herrenhausen--that palace as squat and
+ungraceful as those who had built and who inhabited it--she
+opened her heart to him very fully, allowed him, in her
+overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things which for very shame
+she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept nothing
+back; she dwelt upon her unhappiness with her boorish husband,
+told him of slights and indignities innumerable, whose pain she
+had hitherto so bravely dissembled, confessed, even, that he had
+beaten her upon occasion.
+
+Königsmark went red and white by turns, with the violent surge of
+his emotions, and the deep sapphire eyes blazed with wrath when
+she came at last to the culminating horror of blows endured.
+
+"It is enough, madame," he cried. "I swear to you, as Heaven
+hears me, that he shall be punished."
+
+"Punished?" she echoed, checking in her stride, and looked at him
+with a smile of sad incredulity. "It is not his punishment I
+seek, my friend, but my own salvation."
+
+"The one can be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly,
+and struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of
+this lout as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after him to
+Berlin to-night."
+
+The colour all faded from her cheeks, her sensitive lips fell
+apart, as she looked at him aghast.
+
+"Why, what would you do? What do you mean?" she asked him.
+
+"I will send him the length of my sword, and so make a widow of
+you, madame."
+
+She shook her head. "Princes do not fight," she said, on a note
+of contempt.
+
+"I shall so shame him that he will have no alternative--unless,
+indeed, he is shameless. I will choose my occasion shrewdly, put
+an affront on him one evening in his cups, when drink shall have
+made him valiant enough to commit himself to a meeting. If even
+that will not answer, and he still shields himself behind his
+rank--why, there are other ways to serve him." He was thinking,
+perhaps, of Mr. Thynne.
+
+The heat of so much reckless, romantic fury on her behalf warmed
+the poor lady, who had so long been chilled for want of sympathy,
+and starved of love. Impulsively she caught his hand in hers.
+
+"My friend, my friend!" she cried, on a note that quivered and
+broke. "You are mad--wonderfully beautifully mad, but mad. What
+would become of you if you did this?"
+
+He swept the consideration aside by a contemptuous, almost angry
+gesture. "Does that matter? I am concerned with what is to become
+of you. I was born for your service, my princess, and the service
+being rendered . . ." He shrugged and smiled, threw out his hands
+and let them fall again to his sides in an eloquent gesture. He
+was the complete courtier, the knight-errant, the romantic preux-
+chevalier all in one.
+
+She drew closer to him, took the blue lapels of his military coat
+in her white hands, and looked pathetically up into his beautiful
+face. If ever she wanted to kiss a man, she surely wanted to kiss
+Königsmark in that moment, but as she might have kissed a loving
+brother, in token of her deep gratitude for his devotion to her
+who had known so little true devotion.
+
+"If you knew," she said, "what balsam this proof of your
+friendship has poured upon the wounds of my soul, you would
+understand my utter lack of words in which to thank you. You
+dumbfound me, my friend; I can find no expression for my
+gratitude."
+
+"I ask no gratitude," quoth he. "I am all gratitude myself that
+you should have come to me in the hour of your need. I but ask
+your leave to serve you in my own way."
+
+She shook her head. She saw his blue eyes grow troubled.
+
+He was about to speak, to protest, but she hurried on. "Serve me
+if you will--God knows I need the service of a loyal friend--but
+serve me as I shall myself decide--no other way."
+
+"But what alternative service can exist?" he asked, almost
+impatiently.
+
+"I have it in mind to escape from this horrible place--to quit
+Hanover, never to return."
+
+"But to go whither?"
+
+"Does it matter? Anywhere away from this hateful court, and this
+hateful life; anywhere, since my father will not let me find
+shelter at Zell, as I had hoped. Had it not been for the thought
+of my children, I should have fled long ago. For the sake of
+those two little ones I have suffered patiently through all these
+years. But the limit of endurance has been reached and passed.
+Take me away. Königsmark!" She was clutching his lapels again.
+"If you would really serve me, help me to escape."
+
+His hands descended upon hers, and held them prisoned against his
+breast. A flush crept into his fair cheeks, there was a sudden
+kindling of the eyes that looked down into her own piteous ones.
+These sensitive, romantic natures are quickly stirred to passion,
+ever ready to yield to the adventure of it.
+
+"My princess," he said, "you may count upon your Königsmark while
+he has life." Disengaging her hands from his lapels, but still
+holding them, he bowed low over them, so low that his heavy
+golden mane tumbled forward on either side of his handsome head
+to form a screen under cover of which he pressed his lips upon
+her fingers.
+
+She let him have his will with her hands. It was little enough
+reward for so much devotion.
+
+"I thank you again," she breathed. "And now I must think--I must
+consider where I can count upon finding refuge."
+
+That cooled his ardour a little. His own high romantic notion
+was, no doubt, to fling her there and then upon the withers of
+his horse, and so ride out into the wide world to carve a kingdom
+for her with his sword. Her sober words dispelled the dream,
+revealed to him that it was not quite intended he should
+hereafter be her custodian. And there for the moment the matter
+was suspended.
+
+Both had behaved quite recklessly. Each should have remembered
+that an Electoral Princess is not wise to grant a protracted
+interview, accompanied by lapel-holding, hand-holding, and hand-
+kissings, within sight of the windows of a palace. And, as it
+happened, behind one of those windows lurked the Countess von
+Platen, watching them jealously, and without any disposition to
+construe the meeting innocently. Was she not the deadly enemy of
+both? Had not the Princess whetted satire upon her, and had not
+Königsmark scorned the love she proffered him, and then
+unpardonably published it in a ribald story to excite the mirth
+of profligates?
+
+That evening the Countess purposefully sought her lover, the
+Elector.
+
+"Your son is away in Prussia," quoth she. "Who guards his honour
+in his absence?"
+
+"George's honour?" quoth the Elector, bulging eyes staring at the
+Countess. He did not laugh, as might have been expected at the
+notion of guarding something whose existence was not easily
+discerned. He had no sense of humour, as his appearance
+suggested. He was a short, fat man with a face shaped like a
+pear--narrow in the brow and heavy in the jowl. "What the devil
+do you mean?" he asked.
+
+"I mean that this foreign adventurer, Königsmark, and Sophia grow
+too intimate."
+
+"Sophia!" Thick eyebrows were raised until they almost met the
+line of his ponderous peruke. His face broke into malevolent
+creases expressive of contempt.
+
+"That white-faced ninny! Bah!" Her very virtue was matter for
+his scorn.
+
+"It is these white-faced ninnies can be most sly," replied the
+Countess, out of her worldly wisdom. "Listen a moment now." And
+she related, with interest rather than discount, you may be sure,
+what she had witnessed that afternoon.
+
+The malevolence deepened in his face. He had never loved Sophia,
+and he felt none the kinder towards her for her recent trip to
+Zell. Then, too, being a libertine, and the father of a
+libertine, it logically followed that unchastity in his women-
+folk was in his eyes the unpardonable sin.
+
+He heaved himself out of his deep chair. "How far has this
+gone?" he demanded.
+
+Prudence restrained the Countess from any over-statement that
+might afterwards be disproved. Besides, there was not the need,
+if she could trust her senses. Patience and vigilance would
+presently afford her all the evidence required to damn the pair.
+She said as much, and promised the Elector that she would
+exercise herself the latter quality in his son's service. Again
+the Elector did not find it grotesque that his mistress should
+appoint herself the guardian of his son's honour.
+
+The Countess went about that congenial task with zeal--though
+George's honour was the least thing that concerned her. What
+concerned her was the dishonour of Sophia, and the ruin of
+Königsmark. So she watched assiduously, and set others, too, to
+watch for her and to report. And almost daily now she had for the
+Elector a tale of whisperings and hand-pressings, and secret
+stolen meetings between the guilty twain. The Elector enraged,
+and would have taken action, but that the guileful Countess
+curbed him. All this was not enough. An accusation that could not
+be substantiated would ruin all chance of punishing the
+offenders, might recoil, indeed, upon the accusers by bringing
+the Duke of Zell to his daughter's aid. So they must wait yet
+awhile until they held more absolute proof of this intrigue.
+
+And then at last one day the Countess sped in haste to the
+Elector with word that Königsmark and the Princess had shut
+themselves up together in the garden pavilion. Let him come at
+once, and he should so discover them for himself, and thus at
+last be able to take action. The Countess was flushed with
+triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent--and Madame von Platen
+could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen,
+conceive it innocent--it was in an Electoral Princess an
+unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view,
+which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in
+the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen
+following. He came too late, despite the diligence of his spy.
+
+Sophia had been there, but her interview with the Count had been
+a brief one. She had to tell him that at last she was resolved in
+all particulars. She would seek a refuge at the court of her
+cousin, the Duke of Wolfenbuttel, who, she was sure--for the sake
+of what once had lain between them--would not now refuse to
+shelter and protect her. Of Königsmark she desired that he should
+act as her escort to her cousin's court.
+
+Königsmark was ready, eager. In Hanover he would leave nothing
+that he regretted. At Wolfenbuttelyy, having served Sophia
+faithfully, his ever-growing, romantic passion for her might find
+expression. She would make all dispositions, and advise him when
+she was ready to set out. But they must use caution, for they
+were being spied upon. Madame von Platen's over-eagerness had in
+part betrayed her. It was, indeed, their consciousness of
+espionage which had led to this dangerous meeting in the
+seclusion of the pavilion, and which urged him to linger after
+Sophia had left him. They were not to be seen to emerge together.
+
+The young Dane sat alone on the window-seat, his chin in his
+hands, his eyes dreamy, a faint smile on his shapely lips, when
+Ernest Augustus burst furiously in, the Countess von Platen
+lingering just beyond the threshold. The Elector's face was
+apoplectically purple from rage and haste, his breath came in
+wheezing gasps. His bulging eyes swept round the chamber, and
+fastened finally, glaring, upon the startled Königsmark.
+
+"Where is the Princess?" he blurted out.
+
+The Count espied Madame von Platen in the back ground, and had
+the scent of mischief very strong. But he preserved an air of
+innocent mystification. He rose and answered with courteous ease:
+
+"Your Highness is seeking her? Shall I ascertain for you?"
+
+At a loss, Ernest Augustus stared a moment, then flung a glance
+over his shoulder at the Countess.
+
+"I was told that her Highness was here," he said.
+
+"Plainly," said Königsmark, with perfect calm, "you have been
+misinformed." And his quiet glance and gesture invited the
+Elector to look round for himself.
+
+"How long have you been here yourself?" Feeling at a
+disadvantage, the Elector avoided the direct question that was in
+his mind.
+
+"Half an hour at least."
+
+"And in that time you have not seen the Princess?"
+
+"Seen the Princess?" Königsmark's brows were knit perplexedly. "I
+scarcely understand your Highness."
+
+The Elector moved a step and trod on a soft substance. He looked
+down, then stooped, and rose again, holding in his hand a woman's
+glove.
+
+"What's this?" quoth he. "Whose glove is this?"
+
+If Königsmark's heart missed a beat--as well it may have done--
+he did not betray it outwardly. He smiled; indeed he almost
+laughed.
+
+"Your Highness is amusing himself at my expense by asking me
+questions that only a seer could answer."
+
+The Elector was still considering him with his ponderously
+suspicious glance, when quick steps approached. A serving-maid,
+one of Sophia's women, appeared in the doorway of the pavilion.
+
+"What do you want?" the Elector snapped at her.
+
+"A glove her Highness lately dropped here," was the timid answer,
+innocently precipitating the very discovery which the woman had
+been too hastily dispatched to avert.
+
+The Elector flung the glove at her, and there was a creak of evil
+laughter from him. When she had departed' he turned again to
+Königsmark.
+
+"You fence skilfully," said he, sneering, "too skilfully for an
+honest man. Will you now tell me without any more of this,
+precisely what the Princess Sophia was doing here with you?"
+
+Königsmark drew himself stiffly up, looking squarely into the
+furnace of the Elector's face.
+
+"Your Highness assumes that the Princess was here with me, and a
+prince is not to be contradicted, even when he insults a lady
+whose spotless purity is beyond his understanding. But your
+Highness can hardly expect me to become in never so slight a
+degree a party to that insult by vouchsafing any answer to your
+question."
+
+"That is your last word, sir?" The Elector shook with suppressed
+anger.
+
+"Your Highness cannot think that words are necessary?"
+
+The bulging eyes grew narrow, the heavy nether lip was thrust
+forth in scorn and menace.
+
+"You are relieved, sir, of your duties in the Electoral Guard,
+and as that is the only tie binding you to Hanover, we see no
+reason why your sojourn here should be protracted."
+
+Königsmark bowed stiffly, formally. "It shall end, your Highness,
+as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements for my
+departure--in a week at most."
+
+"You are accorded three days, sir." The Elector turned, and
+waddled out, leaving Königsmark to breathe freely again. The
+three days should suffice for the Princess also. It was very
+well.
+
+The Elector, too, thought that it was very well. He had given
+this troublesome fellow his dismissal, averted a scandal, and
+placed his daughter-in-law out of the reach of harm. Madame von
+Platen was the only one concerned who thought that it was not
+well at all, the consummation being far from that which she had
+desired. She had dreamt of a flaming scandal, that should utterly
+consume her two enemies, Sophia and Königsmark. Instead, she saw
+them both escaping, and the fact that she was--as she may have
+supposed--effectively separating two loving hearts could be no
+sort of adequate satisfaction for such bitter spite as hers.
+Therefore she plied her wicked wits to force an issue more
+germane to her desires.
+
+The course she took was fraught with a certain peril. Yet
+confident that at worst she could justify it, and little fearing
+that the worst would happen, she boldly went to work. She forged
+next day a brief note in which the Princess Sophia urgently bade
+Königsmark to come to her at ten o'clock that night in her own
+apartments, and with threat and bribe induced the waiting woman
+of the glove to bear that letter.
+
+Now it so happened that Königsmark, through the kind offices of
+Sophia's maid-of-honour, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck, who was in
+the secret of their intentions, had sent the Princess a note that
+morning, briefly stating the urgency of departure, and begging
+her so to arrange that she could leave Herrenhausen with him on
+the morrow. He imagined the note now brought him to be in answer
+to that appeal of his. Its genuineness he never doubted, being
+unacquainted with Sophia's writing. He was aghast at the rashness
+which dictated such an acsignation, yet never hesitated as to
+keeping it. It was not his way to hesitate. He trusted to the
+gods who watch over the destinies of the bold.
+
+And meanwhile Madame von Platen was reproaching her lover with
+having dealt too softly with the Dane.
+
+"Bah!" said the Elector. "To-morrow he goes his ways, and we are
+rid of him. Is not that enough?"
+
+"Enough, if, soon as he goes, he goes not too late already,"
+quoth she.
+
+"Now what will you be hinting?" he asked her peevishly.
+
+"I'll be more plain. I will tell you what I know. It is this.
+Königsmark has an assignation with the Princess Sophia this
+very night at ten o'clock--and where do you suppose? In her
+Highness's own apartments."
+
+The Elector came to his feet with an oath. "That is not true!" he
+cried. "It cannot be!"
+
+"Then I'll say no more," quoth Jezebel, and snapped her thin
+lips.
+
+"Ah, but you shall. How do you know this?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you without betraying a confidence. Let it
+suffice you that I do know it. Consider now whether in banishing
+this profligate you have sufficiently avenged the honour of your
+son."
+
+"My God, if I thought this were true...." He choked with rage,
+stood shaking a moment, then strode to the door, calling.
+
+"The truth is easily ascertained," said Madame. "Conceal yourself
+in the Rittersaal, and await his coming forth. But you had best
+go attended, for it is a very reckless rogue, and he has been
+known aforetime to practice murder."
+
+Whilst the Elector, acting upon this advice, was getting his men
+together, Königsmark was wasting precious moments in Sophia's
+antechamber, whilst Mademoiselle de Knesebeck apprised her
+Highness of his visit. Sophia had already retired to bed, and
+the amazing announcement of the Count's presence there startled
+her into a fear of untoward happenings. She was overwhelmed, too,
+by the rashness of this step of his, coming after the events
+of yesterday. If it should be known that he had visited her
+thus, terrible consequences might ensue. She rose, and with
+Mademoiselle de Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive him. Yet
+for all that she made haste, the precious irreclaimable moments
+sped.
+
+She came to him at last, Mademoiselle de Knesebeck following, for
+propriety's sake.
+
+"What is it?" she asked him breathlessly. "What brings you here
+at such an hour?"
+
+"What brings me?" quoth he, surprised at that reception. "Why,
+your commands--your letter."
+
+"My letter? What letter?"
+
+A sense of doom, of being trapped, suddenly awoke in him. He
+plucked forth the treacherous note, and proffered it.
+
+"Why, what does this mean?" She swept a white hand over her eyes
+and brows, as if to brush away some thing that obscured her
+vision. "That is not mine. I never wrote it. How could you dream
+I should be imprudent as to bid you hither, and at such an hour
+How could you dream it?"
+
+"You are right," said he, and laughed, perhaps to ease her alarm,
+perhaps in sheer bitter mirth. "It will be, no doubt, the work of
+our friend, Madame von Platen. I had best begone. For the rest,
+my travelling chaise will wait from noon until sunset to-morrow
+by the Markt Kirck in Hanover, and I shall wait within it. I
+shall hope to conduct you safely to Wolfenbuttelyy."
+
+"I will come, I will come. But go now--oh, go!"
+
+He looked very deeply into her eyes--a valedictory glance against
+the worst befalling him. Then he took her hand, bowed over it and
+kissed it, and so departed.
+
+He crossed the outer ante-room, descended the short flight of
+stairs, and pushed open the heavy door of the Hall of Knights. He
+passed through, and thrust the door behind him, then stood a
+moment looking round the vast apartment. If he was too late to
+avoid the springs of the baited trap, it was here that they
+should snap upon him. Yet all was still. A single lamp on a table
+in the middle of the vast chamber shed a feeble, flickering
+light, yet sufficient to assure him that no one waited here. He
+sighed relief, wrapped his cloak about him, and set out swiftly
+to cross the hall.
+
+But even as he passed, four shadows detached themselves from the
+tall stove, resolved themselves into armed men, and sprang after
+him.
+
+He heard them, wheeled about, flung off his cloak, and disengaged
+his sword, all with the speed of lightning and the address of the
+man who for ten years had walked amid perils, and learned to
+depend upon his blade. That swift action sealed his doom. Their
+orders were to take him living or dead, and standing in awe of
+his repute, they were not the men to incur risks. Even as he came
+on guard, a partisan grazed his head, and another opened his
+breast.
+
+He went down, coughing and gasping, blood dabbling his bright
+golden hair, and staining the priceless Mechlin at his throat,
+yet his right hand still desperately clutching his useless sword.
+
+His assassins stood about him, their partisans levelled to strike
+again, and summoned him to yield. Then, beside one of them, he
+suddenly beheld the Countess von Platen materializing out of the
+surrounding shadows as it seemed, and behind her the squat,
+ungraceful figure of the Elector. He fought for breath.
+"I am slain," he gasped, "and as I am to appear before my Maker
+I swear to you that the Princess Sophia is innocent. Spare her at
+least, your Highness."
+
+"Innocent!" said the Elector hoarsely. "Then what did you now in
+her apartments?
+
+"It was a trap set for us by this foul hag, who . . ."
+
+The heel of the vindictive harridan ground viciously upon the
+lips of the dying man and choked his utterance. Thereafter the
+halberts finished him off, and he was buried there and then, in
+lime, under the floor of the Hall of Knights, under the very spot
+where he had fallen, which was long to remain imbrued with his
+blood.
+
+Thus miserably perished the glittering Königsmark, a martyr to
+his own irrepressible romanticism.
+
+As for Sophia, better might it have been for her had she shared
+his fate that night. She was placed under arrest next morning,
+and Prince George was summoned back from Berlin at once.
+
+The evidence may have satisfied him that his honour had not
+suffered, for he was disposed to let the matter drop, content
+that they should remain in the forbidding relations which had
+existed between them before this happening. But Sophia was
+uncompromising in her demand for strict justice.
+
+"If I am guilty, I am unworthy of you," she told him. "If
+innocent, you are unworthy of me."
+
+There was no more to be said. A consistory court was assembled to
+divorce them. But since with the best intentions there was no
+faintest evidence of her adultery, this court had to be content
+to pronounce the divorce upon the ground of her desertion.
+
+She protested against the iniquity of this. But she protested in
+vain. She was carried off into the grim captivity of a castle on
+the Ahlen, to drag out in that melancholy duress another thirty-
+two years of life.
+
+Her death took place in November of 1726. And the story runs that
+on her death-bed she delivered to a person of trust a letter to
+her sometime husband, now King George I. of England. Seven months
+later, as King George was on his way to his beloved Hanover, that
+letter was placed in his carriage as it crossed the frontier into
+Germany. It contained Sophia's dying declaration of innocence,
+and her solemn summons to King George to stand by her side before
+the judgment-seat of Heaven within a year, and there make answer
+in her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her blighted
+life and her miserable death.
+
+King George's answer to that summons was immediate. The reading
+of that letter brought on the apoplectic seizure of which he died
+in his carriage next day--the 9th of June, 1727--on the road to
+Osnabruck.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE TYRANNICIDE
+
+Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
+
+
+
+Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam Lux, her
+lover in the sublimest and most spiritual sense of the word--for
+he never so much as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew
+of his existence.
+
+The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld
+her in the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting
+corollary to her action. She in her way and he in his were alike
+sublime; her tranquil martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism
+and his exultant martyrdom upon the altar of Love were alike
+splendidly futile.
+
+It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It
+has its pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no
+might-have-been which death had thwarted. Because she died, he
+loved her; because he loved her, he died. That is all, but for
+the details which I am now to give you.
+
+The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter
+of a landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chétive
+noblesse, a man of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may
+have predisposed him against the law of entail or primogeniture--
+the prime cause of the inequality out of which were sprung so
+many of the evils that afflicted France. Like many of his order
+and condition he was among the earliest converts to Republicanism--
+the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding constitutional government
+of the people by the people, holding monarchical and aristocratic
+rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
+
+From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican
+doctrines to which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she
+rejoiced when the hour of awakening sounded and the children of
+France rose up and snapped the fetters in which they had been
+trammelled for centuries by an insolent minority of their fellow-
+countrymen.
+
+In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a
+transient phase--horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion
+of that awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal
+government of her dreams would follow--must follow, since among
+the people's elected representatives was a goodly number of
+unselfish, single-minded men of her father's class of life; men
+of breeding and education, impelled by a lofty altruistic
+patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party presently to
+be known as the Girondins.
+
+But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least
+another. And this other in the National Assembly was that of the
+Jacobins, less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party
+in which stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as
+Robespierre, Danton,--and Marat.
+
+Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood
+for Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins
+arraigned Marat and Robespierre for complicity in the September
+massacres, and thereby precipitated their own fall. The triumphant
+acquittal of Marat was the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins,
+and the proscription of twenty-nine deputies followed at once as
+the first step. These fled into the country, hoping to raise an
+army that should yet save France, and several of the fugitives
+made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and oratory they
+laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were gifted,
+able men, eloquent speakers and skilled writers, and they might
+have succeeded but that in Paris sat another man no less gifted,
+and with surer knowledge of the temper of the proletariat,
+tirelessly wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of
+inflaming the passions of the mob.
+
+That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner,
+sometime professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish
+University of St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many
+sociological works, inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary
+journalist, proprietor and editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of
+the Parisian rabble, who had bestowed upon him the name borne by
+his gazette, so that he was known as The People's Friend.
+
+Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic,
+Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived
+and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were
+all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de
+Médecine in Paris he span with his clever, wicked pen a web that
+paralysed their high endeavours and threatened finally to choke
+them.
+
+He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate
+in which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the
+Girondins he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and
+implacable of the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday--the friend
+and associate now of the proscribed Girondins who had sought
+refuge in Caen--he loomed so vast and terrible as to eclipse his
+associates entirely. To her young mind, inflamed with enthusiasm
+for the religion of Liberty as preached by the Girondins, Marat
+was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening to corrupt that
+sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and to replace
+the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
+still.
+
+She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to
+raise an army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches
+of the Jacobins. An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw
+in it a sign that Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On
+the lips of her friends the Girondins she caught again the name
+of Marat, the murderer of Liberty; and, brooding, she reached a
+conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter which she wrote about
+that time.
+
+"As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the
+friends of law and humanity."
+
+From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent
+it was but a step. That step she took. She may have considered
+awhile the proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have
+come to her with realization. She understood that a great
+sacrifice was necessary; that who undertook to rid France of that
+unclean monster must go prepared for self-immolation. She counted
+the cost calmly and soberly--for calm and sober was now her every
+act.
+
+She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach
+from Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had
+written:
+
+"I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
+possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in
+France. On leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it
+I shall no longer be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of
+living together, as it has denied us other happinesses. May it
+show itself more clement to our country. Good-by, dear Father.
+Embrace my sister for me, and do not forget me."
+
+That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was
+intended to save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her
+identity should remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the
+very Hall of the Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat.
+Thus Paris should behold Nemesis overtaking the false Republican
+in the very Assembly which he corrupted, and anon should adduce a
+moral from the spectacle of the monster's death. For herself she
+counted upon instant destruction at the hands of the furious
+spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified, she trusted that
+her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great tidings
+that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
+of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
+
+You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of
+this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the
+Paris diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the
+Republic--1793, old style. She was becomingly dressed in brown
+cloth, a lace fichu folded across her well-developed breast, a
+conical hat above her light brown hair. She was of a good height
+and finely proportioned, and her carriage as full of dignity as
+of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness that a contemporary
+compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was gray-eyed, and,
+like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face squaring a little
+at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her habit, calm
+her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and calm
+the mind reflected in all this.
+
+And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the
+open country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the
+errand upon which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-
+receiving mission, can shake that normal calm. Here is no wild
+exaltation, no hysterical obedience to hotly-conceived impulse.
+Here is purpose, as cold as it is lofty, to liberate France and
+pay with her life for the privilege of doing so.
+
+That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared
+her ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan
+moved with pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations,
+sustained by the heady wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly
+indulged, towards a goal of triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly
+in the stuffy diligence with the quiet conviction that her days
+were numbered.
+
+So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one
+among them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous
+attentions, and actually proposed marriage to her before the
+coach had rolled over the bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days
+later.
+
+She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux
+Augustine, where she engaged a room on the first floor, and then
+she set out in quest of the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of
+introduction to him from the Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she
+had been on friendly terms at Caen. Duperret was to assist her to
+obtain an interview with the Minister of the Interior. She had
+undertaken to see the latter on the subject of certain papers
+relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an old convent friend
+of her own, and she was in haste to discharge this errand, so as
+to be free for the great task upon which she was come.
+
+From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was
+ill, and confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change
+of plans, and the relinquishing of her project of affording him a
+spectacular death in the crowded hall of the Convention.
+
+The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the
+business of her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose
+early, and by six o'clock she was walking in the cool gardens of
+the Palais Royal, considering with that almost unnatural calm of
+hers the ways and means of accomplishing her purpose in the
+unexpected conditions that she found.
+
+Towards eight o'clock, when Paris was awakening to the business
+of the day and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler's
+shop in the Palais Royal, and bought for two francs a stout
+kitchen knife in a shagreen case. She then returned to her hotel
+to breakfast, and afterwards, dressed in her brown travelling-
+gown and conical hat, she went forth again, and, hailing a
+hackney carnage, drove to Marat's house in the Rue de l'Ecole de
+Médecine.
+
+But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The
+Citizen Marat was ill, she was told, and could receive no
+visitors. It was Simonne Everard, the triumvir's mistress--later
+to be known as the Widow Marat--who barred her ingress with this
+message.
+
+Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter
+to the triumvir:
+
+"Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic.
+"Citizen,--I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country
+leads me to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the
+unfortunate events which are taking place in that part of the
+Republic. I shall therefore call upon you towards one o'clock.
+Have the kindness to receive me, and accord me a moment's
+audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering a great service
+to France.
+"Marie Corday."
+
+Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late
+afternoon waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of
+receiving any, she wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
+
+"I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter?
+May I hope for a moment's audience? If you have received my
+letter, I hope you will not refuse me, considering the importance
+of the matter. It should suffice for you that I am very
+unfortunate to give me the right to your protection."
+
+Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown--you observe this
+further manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no
+departure from the ordinary habits of life--she goes forth to
+deliver in person this second letter, the knife concealed in the
+folds of the muslin fichu crossed high upon her breast.
+
+In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room
+of that house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, the People's
+Friend is seated in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he
+is obeying, for in all France there is no man more filthy in his
+person and his habits than this triumvir. His bath is medicated.
+The horrible, loathsome disease that corrodes his flesh demands
+these long immersions to quiet the gnawing pains which distract
+his active, restless mind. In these baths he can benumb the
+torment of the body with which he is encumbered.
+
+For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more--leastways, nothing
+more that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs
+and organs he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay.
+His very lack of personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he
+lives, the insufficient sleep which he allows himself, his habit
+of careless feeding at irregular intervals, all have their source
+in his contempt for the physical part of him. This talented man
+of varied attainments, accomplished linguist, skilled physician,
+able naturalist and profound psychologist, lives in his intellect
+alone, impatient of all physical interruptions. If he consents to
+these immersions, if he spends whole days seated in this
+medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or cools the
+fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend his
+mind to the work that ishis life. But his long-suffering body is
+avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been
+submitted. The morbid condition of the former is being
+communicated to the latter, whence results that disconcerting
+admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and exalted sensibility which
+marked his nature in the closing years of his life.
+
+In his bath, then, sat the People's Friend on that July evening,
+immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his
+emaciated body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years
+of age, dying of consumption and other things, so that, did
+Charlotte but know it, there is no need to murder him. Disease
+and Death have marked him for their own, and grow impatient.
+
+A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty
+wooden box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of
+paper, and two or three copies of L'Ami do Peuple. There was no
+sound in the room but the scratch and splutter of his quill. He
+was writing diligently, revising and editing a proof of the
+forthcoming issue of his paper.
+
+A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in
+which he was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption,
+until it disturbed and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his
+bath, listened a moment, then, with intent to make an end of the
+interruption, he raised a hoarse, croaking voice to inquire what
+might be taking place.
+
+The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge,
+entered the room. She was fully twenty years younger than
+himself, and under the slattern appearance which life in that
+house had imposed upon her there were vestiges of a certain
+comeliness.
+
+"There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently
+to see you upon a matter of national importance."
+
+The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in
+that leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old
+foes of his, the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
+
+"She says," Simonne continued, "that she wrote a letter to you
+this morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have
+told her that you will not receive anyone, and . . ."
+
+"Give me the note," he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust
+out an unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne's
+hand. He spread it, and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his
+eyes narrowing to slits.
+
+"Let her in," he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him
+without more ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone
+together--the avenger and her victim. For a moment each regarded
+the other. Marat beheld a handsome young woman, elegantly
+attired. But these things had no interest for the People's
+Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of beauty? Charlotte
+beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and was full
+satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
+confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot
+out.
+
+Then Marat spoke. "So you are from Caen, child?" he said. "And
+what is doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?"
+
+She approached him.
+
+"Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat."
+
+"Rebellion, ha!" It was a sound between a laugh and a croak.
+"Tell me what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their
+names." He took up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of
+paper towards him.
+
+She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him,
+erect and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the
+Girondins, whilst hunched there in his bath his pen scratched
+briskly.
+
+"So many for the guillotine," he snarled, when it was done.
+
+But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her
+fichu, and as he uttered those words of doom to others his own
+doom descended upon him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by
+that strong young arm, the long, stout blade was buried to its
+black hilt in his breast.
+
+He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as
+he sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
+
+"Help, chére amie! Help!" he cried, and was for ever silent.
+
+The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the
+bath at the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank
+sideways in the same direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon
+his right shoulder, whilst from the great rent in his breast the
+blood gushed forth, embruing the water of his bath, trickling to
+the brick-paved floor, bespattering--symbolically almost--a copy
+of L'Ami du Peuple, the journal to which he had devoted so much
+of his uneasy life.
+
+In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
+sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a
+tigress, she sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by
+the head, and calling loudly the while for assistance. Came
+instantly from the anteroom Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of
+the house, and Laurent Basse, a folder of Marat's paper; and now
+Charlotte found herself confronted by four maddened, vociferous
+beings, at whose hands she may well have expected to receive the
+death for which she was prepared.
+
+Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of
+it across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his
+fury to have battered her to death, but for the arrival of gens
+d'armes and the police commissioner of the district, who took her
+in their protecting charge.
+
+The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became
+known. All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the
+revolutionary rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch
+upon the house wherein the People's Friend lay dead.
+
+That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte
+Corday lay in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude
+the indignities that for a woman were almost inseparable from
+revolutionary incarceration. She preserved throughout her
+imperturbable calm, based now upon a state of mind content in the
+contemplation of accomplished purpose, duty done. She had saved
+France, she believed; saved Liberty, by slaying the man who would
+have strangled it. In that illusion she was content. Her own life
+was a small price to pay for the splendid achievement.
+
+Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her
+friends, in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she
+had done, expounding fully the motives that had impelled her,
+dwelling upon the details of the execution, and of all that had
+followed. Among the letters written by her during those "days of
+the preparation of peace "--as she calls that period, dating in
+such terms a long epistle to Barbaroux--was one to the Committee
+of Public Safety, in which she begs that a miniature-painter may
+be sent to her to paint her portrait, so that she may leave this
+token of remembrance to her friends. It is only in this, as the
+end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought for her
+own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
+instrument in the hands of Fate.
+
+On the 15th, at eight o'clock in the morning, her trial began
+before the Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall
+as she appeared in her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and
+calm--always calm.
+
+The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of
+the cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
+
+"These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat."
+
+The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to
+examine her.
+
+"What was the object of your visit to Paris?" he asks.
+
+"To kill Marat."
+
+"What motives induced you to this horrible deed?"
+
+"His many crimes."
+
+"Of what crimes do you accuse him?"
+
+"That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive
+the fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator;
+that he sought to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by
+causing the arrest and imprisonment of the deputies to the
+Convention on May 31st."
+
+"What proof have you of this?"
+
+"The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a
+mask of patriotism."
+
+Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
+
+"Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+Montane shook his head. "You cannot convince anyone that a person
+of your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless
+instigated by some person or persons whom you are unwilling to
+name."
+
+Charlotte almost smiled. "That shows but a poor knowledge of the
+human heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the
+strength of one's own hatred than upon that of others." And then,
+raising her voice, she proclaimed: "I killed one man to save a
+hundred thousand; I killed a villain to save innocents; I killed
+a savage Wild-beast to give repose to France. I was a Republican
+before the Revolution. I never lacked for energy."
+
+What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established.
+Her fearless self-ossession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-
+Tinville, the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her
+so virginal and fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal
+had not had the best of it, he sought with a handful of
+revolutionary filth to restore the balance. He rose slowly, his
+ferrety eyes upon her.
+
+"How many children have you had?" he rasped, sardonic, his tone a
+slur, an insult.
+
+Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed,
+disdainful, as she answered coldly:
+
+"Have I not stated that I am not married?"
+
+A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the
+impression he sought to convey, and he sat down again.
+
+It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed
+to defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had
+been intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering
+him to remain silent, another from the President bidding him
+declare her mad.
+
+Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable;
+it satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his
+client. It uttered the whole truth.
+
+"The prisoner," he said, "confesses with calm the horrible crime
+she has committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she
+confesses its most dreadful details; in short, she confesses
+everything, and does riot seek to justify herself. That, citizens
+of the jury, is her whole defence. This imperturbable calm, this
+utter abnegation of self, which displays no remorse even in the
+very presence of death, are contrary to nature. They can only be
+explained by the excitement of political fanaticism which armed
+her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury, to judge what
+weight that moral consideration should have in the scales of
+justice."
+
+The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full
+sentence of the law.
+
+It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the
+antechamber of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent
+to her, but she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his
+ministrations. She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received
+the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in
+accordance with her request. And during the sitting, which lasted
+half an hour, she conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics,
+the tranquillity of her spirit unruffled by any fear of the death
+that was so swiftly approaching.
+
+The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He
+carried the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination.
+She showed no dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that
+the time spent with Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged
+for a few moments in which to write a note, and, the request
+being granted, acquitted herself briskly of that task, then
+announcing herself ready, she removed her cap that Sanson might
+cut her luxuriant hair. Yet first, taking his scissors, she
+herself cut off a lock and gave it to Hauer for remembrance. When
+Sanson would have bound her hands, she begged that she might be
+allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were bruised and cut by the
+cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat's house. He
+answered that she might do so if she wished, but that it was
+unnecessary, as he could bind her without causing pain.
+
+"To be sure," she said, "those others had not your experience,"
+and she proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further
+demur. "If this toilet of death is performed by rude hands," she
+commented, "at least it leads to immortality."
+
+She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and,
+disdaining the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to
+show herself dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce
+was that rage, indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that
+the tumbril proceeded at a crawl, and the people surging about
+the cart screamed death and insult at the doomed woman. It took
+two hours to reach the Place de la Révolution, and meanwhile a
+terrific summer thunderstorm had broken over Paris, and a
+torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed streets.
+Charlotte's garments were soaked through and through, so that her
+red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
+skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a
+reflection of the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her
+cheeks, and thus heightened her appearance of complete composure.
+
+And it is now in the Rue St. Honoré that at long last we reach
+the opening of our tragic love-story.
+
+A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux--sent to Paris by the
+city of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention--
+was standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
+accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy
+and of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never
+practiced owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered
+anatomical work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted
+imagination, unhappily married--the not uncommon fate of such
+delicate temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had
+heard, as all Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of
+the trial, and he waited there, curious to see this woman, with
+whose deed he was secretly in sympathy.
+
+The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled
+up around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full
+of life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed
+upon her, standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of
+those about him, he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and
+paid homage to her. She did not see him. He had not thought that
+she would. He saluted her as the devout salute the unresponsive
+image of a saint. The tumbril crawled on. He turned his head, and
+followed her with his eyes for awhile; then, driving his elbows
+into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a passage
+through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
+gaze, a man entranced.
+
+He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the
+last he had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable
+calm, and in the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the
+great knife his voice suddenly rang out.
+
+"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added,
+addressing those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were
+beautiful to have died with her!"
+
+He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at
+that moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's
+attendant, who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped
+the cheek with his hand. The story runs that the dead face
+reddened under the blow. Scientists of the day disputed over this,
+some arguing from it a proof that consciousness does not at once
+depart the brain upon decapitation.
+
+That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded
+with copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of
+Republicanism, the deliverer of France, in which occurs the
+comparison with Joan of Arc, that other great heroine of France.
+This was the work of Adam Lux. He made no secret of it. The
+vision of her had so wrought upon the imagination of this
+susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such enthusiasm,
+that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
+expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last
+moments of life she had inspired him.
+
+Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
+urged the purity of her motive as the fullest justification of her
+act, placed her on the level of Brutus and Cato, and passionately
+demanded for her the honour and veneration of posterity. It is in
+this manifesto that he applies euphemistically to her deed the term
+"tyrannicide." That document he boldly signed with his own name,
+realizing that he would pay for that temerity with his life.
+
+He was arrested on the 24th of July--exactly a week from the day
+on which he had seen her die. He had powerful friends, and they
+exerted themselves to obtain for him a promise of pardon and
+release if he would publicly retract what he had written. But he
+laughed the proposal to scorn, ardently resolved to follow into
+death the woman who had aroused the hopeless, immaterial love
+that made his present torment.
+
+Still his friends strove for him. His trial was put off. A doctor
+named Wetekind was found to testify that Adam Lux was mad, that
+the sight of Charlotte Corday had turned his head. He wrote a
+paper on this plea, recommending that clemency be shown to the
+young doctor on the score of his affliction, and that he should
+be sent to a hospital or to America. Adam Lux was angry when he
+heard of this, and protested indignantly against the allegations
+of Dr. Wetekind. He wrote to the Journal de la Montagne, which
+published his declaration on the 26th of September, to the effect
+that he was not mad enough to desire to live, and that his
+anxiety to meet death half-way was a crowning proof of his
+sanity.
+
+He languished on in the prison of La Force until the 10th of
+October, when at last he was brought to trial. He stood it
+joyously, in a mood of exultation at his approaching deliverance.
+He assured the court that he did not fear the guillotine, and
+that all ignominy had been removed from such a death by the pure
+blood of Charlotte.
+
+They sentenced him to death, and he thanked them for the boon.
+
+"Forgive me, sublime Charlotte," he exclaimed, "if I should find
+it impossible to exhibit at the last the courage and gentleness
+that were yours. I glory in your superiority, for it is right
+that the adored should be above the adorer."
+
+Yet his courage did not fail him. Far from it, indeed; if hers
+had been a mood of gentle calm, his was one of ecstatic
+exaltation. At five o'clock that same afternoon he stepped from
+the tumbril under the gaunt shadow of the guillotine. He turned
+to the people, his eyes bright, a flush on his cheeks.
+
+"At last I am to have the happiness of dying for Charlotte," he
+told them, and mounted the scaffold with the eager step of the
+bridegroom on his way to the nuptial altar.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT, SECOND SERIES ***
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