Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “Not a word,” said Casanova to the monk, “but follow me.”

  Holding his spontoon ready, but concealed under his coat, he stepped to the side of the door. It opened, and the porter, who had come alone and bareheaded, stared in stupefaction at the strange apparition of Casanova.

  Casanova took advantage of that paralyzing amazement. Without uttering a word, he stepped quickly across the threshold, and with Balbi close upon his heels, he went down the Giant’s Staircase in a flash, crossed the little square, reached the canal, bundled Balbi into the first gondola he found there, and jumped in after him.

  “I want to go to Fusine, and quickly,” he announced. “Call another oarsman.”

  All was ready, and in a moment the gondola was skimming the canal. Dressed in his unseasonable suit, and accompanied by the still more ridiculous figure of Balbi in his gaudy cloak and without a hat, he imagined he would be taken for a charlatan or an astrologer.

  The gondola slipped past the custom-house, and took the canal of the Giudecca. Halfway down this, Casanova put his head out of the little cabin to address the gondolier in the poop.

  “Do you think we shall reach Mestre in an hour?”

  “Mestre?” quoth the gondolier. “But you said Fusine.”

  “No, no, I said Mestre — at least, I intended to say Mestre.”

  And so the gondola was headed for Mestre by a gondolier who professed himself ready to convey his excellency to England if he desired it.

  The sun was rising, and the water assumed an opalescent hue. It was a delicious morning, Casanova tells us, and I suspect that never had any morning seemed to that audacious, amiable rascal as delicious as this upon which he regained his liberty, which no man ever valued more highly.

  In spirit he was already safely over the frontiers of the Most Serene Republic, impatient to transfer his body thither, as he shortly did, through vicissitudes that are a narrative in themselves, and no part of this story of his escape from the Piombi and the Venetian Inquisitors of State.

  XIII. THE NIGHT OF MASQUERADE — The Assassination Of Gustavus III Of Sweden

  Baron Bjelke sprang from his carriage almost before it had come to a standstill and without waiting for the footman to let down the steps. With a haste entirely foreign to a person of his station and importance, he swept into the great vestibule of the palace, and in a quivering voice flung a question at the first lackey he encountered:

  “Has His Majesty started yet?”

  “Not yet, my lord.”

  The answer lessened his haste, but not his agitation. He cast off the heavy wolfskin pelisse in which he had been wrapped, and, leaving it in the hands of the servant, went briskly up the grand staircase, a tall, youthful figure, very graceful in the suit of black he wore.

  As he passed through a succession of ante-rooms on his way to the private apartments of the King, those present observed the pallor of his clean-cut face under the auburn tie-wig he affected, and the feverish glow of eyes that took account of no one. They could not guess that Baron Bjelke, the King’s secretary and favourite, carried in his hands the life of his royal master, or its equivalent in the shape of the secret of the plot to assassinate him.

  In many ways Bjelke was no better than the other profligate minions of the profligate Gustavus of Sweden. But he had this advantage over them, that his intellect was above their average. He had detected the first signs of the approach of that storm which the King himself had so heedlessly provoked. He knew, as much by reason as by intuition, that, in these days when the neighbouring State of France writhed in the throes of a terrific revolution against monarchic and aristocratic tyranny, it was not safe for a king to persist in the abuse of his parasitic power. New ideas of socialism were in the air. They were spreading through Europe, and it was not only in France that men accounted it an infamous anachronism that the great mass of a community should toil and sweat and suffer for the benefit of an insolent minority.

  Already had there been trouble with the peasantry in Sweden, and Bjelke had endangered his position as a royal favourite by presuming to warn his master. Gustavus III desired amusement, not wisdom, from those about him. He could not be brought to realize the responsibilities which kingship imposes upon a man. It has been pretended that he was endowed with great gifts of mind. He may have been, though the thing has been pretended of so many princes that one may be sceptical where evidence is lacking. If he possessed those gifts, he succeeded wonderfully in concealing them under a nature that was frivolously gay, dissolute, and extravagant.

  His extravagance forced him into monstrous extortions when only a madman would have wasted in profligacy the wealth so cruelly wrung from long-suffering subjects. From extortion he was driven by his desperate need of money into flagrant dishonesty. At a stroke of the pen he had reduced the value of the paper currency by one-third — a reduction so violent and sudden that, whilst it impoverished many, it involved some in absolute ruin — and this that he might gratify his appetite for magnificence and enrich the rapacious favourites who shared his profligacy.

  The unrest in the kingdom spread. It was no longer a question of the resentment of a more or less docile peasantry whose first stirrings of revolt were easily quelled. The lesser nobility of Sweden were angered by a measure — following upon so many others — that bore peculiarly heavily upon themselves; and out of that anger, fanned by one man — John Jacob Ankarstrom — who had felt the vindictive spirit of royal injustice, flamed in secret the conspiracy against the King’s life which Bjelke had discovered.

  He had discovered it by the perilous course of joining the conspirators. He had won their confidence, and they recognized that his collaboration was rendered invaluable by the position he held so near the King. And in his subtle wisdom, at considerable danger to himself, Bjelke had kept his counsel. He had waited until now, until the moment when the blow was about to fall, before making the disclosure which should not only save Gustavus, but enable him to cast a net in which all the plotters must be caught. And he hoped that when Gustavus perceived the narrowness of his escape, and the reality of the dangers amid which he walked, he would consider the wisdom of taking another course in future.

  He had reached the door of the last ante-chamber, when a detaining hand was laid upon his arm. He found himself accosted by a page — the offspring of one of the noblest families in Sweden, and the son of one of Bjelke’s closest friends, a fair-haired, impudent boy to whom the secretary permitted a certain familiarity.

  “Are you on your way to the King, Baron?” the lad inquired.

  “I am, Carl. What is it?”

  “A letter for His Majesty — a note fragrant as a midsummer rose — which a servant has just delivered to me. Will you take it?”

  “Give it to me, impudence,” said Bjelke, the ghost of a smile lighting for a moment his white face.

  He took the letter and passed on into the last antechamber, which was empty of all but a single chamberlain-in-waiting. This chamberlain bowed respectfully to the Baron.

  “His Majesty?” said Bjelke.

  “He is dressing. Shall I announce Your Excellency?”

  “Pray do.”

  The chamberlain vanished, and Bjelke was left alone. Waiting, he stood there, idly fingering the scented note he had received from the page. As he turned it in his fingers the superscription came uppermost, and he turned it no more. His eyes lost their absorbed look, their glance quickened into attention, a frown shaped itself between them like a scar; his breathing, suspended a moment, was renewed with a gasp. He stepped aside to a table bearing a score of candles clustered in a massive silver branch, and held the note so that the light fell full upon the writing.

  Standing thus, he passed a hand over his eyes and stared again, two hectic spots burning now in his white cheeks. Abruptly, disregarding the superscription, his trembling fingers snapped the blank seal and unfolded the letter addressed to his royal master. He was still reading when the chamberlain returned to announce that the King w
as pleased to see the Baron at once. He did not seem to hear the announcement. His attention was all upon the letter, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grin, and beads of perspiration glistening upon his brow.

  “His Majesty—” the chamberlain was beginning to repeat, when he broke off suddenly. “Your Excellency is ill?”

  “Ill?”

  Bjelke stared at him with glassy eyes. He crumpled the letter in his hand and stuffed one and the other into the pocket of his black satin coat. He attempted to laugh to reassure the startled chamberlain, and achieved a ghastly grimace.

  “I must not keep His Majesty waiting,” he said thickly, and stumbled on, leaving in the chamberlain’s mind a suspicion that His Majesty’s secretary was not quite sober.

  But Bjelke so far conquered his emotion that he was almost his usual imperturbable self when he reached the royal dressing-room; indeed, he no longer displayed even the agitation that had possessed him when first he entered the palace.

  Gustavus, a slight, handsome man of a good height, was standing before a cheval-glass when Bjelke came in. Francois, the priceless valet His Majesty had brought back from his last pleasure-seeking visit to pre-revolutionary Paris some five years ago, was standing back judicially to consider the domino he had just placed upon the royal shoulders. Baron Armfelt whom the conspirators accused of wielding the most sinister of all the sinister influences that perverted the King’s mind — dressed from head to foot in shimmering white satin, lounged on a divan with all the easy familiarity permitted to this most intimate of courtiers, the associate of all royal follies.

  Gustavus looked over his shoulder as he entered.

  “Why, Bjelke,” he exclaimed, “I thought you had gone into the country!”

  “I am at a loss,” replied Bjelke, “to imagine what should have given Your Majesty so mistaken an impression.” And he might have smiled inwardly to observe how his words seemed to put Gustavus out of countenance.

  The King laughed, nevertheless, with an affectation of ease.

  “I inferred it from your absence from Court on such a night. What has been keeping you?” But, without waiting for an answer, he fired another question. “What do you say to my domino, Bjelke?”

  It was a garment embroidered upon a black satin ground with tongues of flame so cunningly wrought in mingling threads of scarlet and gold that as he turned about now they flashed in the candlelight, and seemed to leap like tongues of living fire.

  “Your Majesty will have a great success,” said Bjelke, and to himself relished the full grimness of his joke. For a terrible joke it was, seeing that he no longer intended to discharge the errand which had brought him in such haste to the palace.

  “Faith, I deserve it!” was the flippant answer, and he turned again to the mirror to adjust a patch on the left side of his chin. “There is genius in this domino, and it is not the genius of Francois, for the scheme of flames is my very own, the fruit of a deal of thought and study.”

  There Gustavus uttered his whole character. As a master of the revels, or an opera impresario, this royal rake would have been a complete success in life. The pity of it was that the accident of birth should have robed him in the royal purple. Like many another prince who has come to a violent end, he was born to the wrong metier.

  “I derived the notion,” he continued, “from a sanbenito in a Goya picture.”

  “An ominous garb,” said Bjelke, smiling curiously. “The garment of the sinner on his way to penitential doom.”

  Armfelt cried out in a protest of mock horror, but Gustavus laughed cynically.

  “Oh, I confess that it would be most apt. I had not thought of it.”

  His fingers sought a pomatum box, and in doing so displaced a toilet-case of red morocco. An oblong paper package fell from the top of this and arrested the King’s attention.

  “Why, what is this?” He took it up — a letter bearing the superscription:

  To His MAJESTY THE KING

  SECRET AND IMPORTANT

  “What is this, Francois?” The royal voice was suddenly sharp.

  The valet glided forward, whilst Armfelt rose from the divan and, like Bjelke, attracted by the sudden change in the King’s tone and manner, drew near his master.

  “How comes this letter here?”

  The valet’s face expressed complete amazement. It must have been placed there in his absence an hour ago, after he had made all preparations for the royal toilette. It was certainly not there at the time, or he must have seen it.

  With impatient fingers Gustavus snapped the seal and unfolded the letter. Awhile he stood reading, very still, his brows knit.

  Then, with a contemptuous “Poof!” he handed it to his secretary.

  At a glance Bjelke recognized the hand for that of Colonel Lillehorn, one of the conspirators, whose courage had evidently failed him in the eleventh hour. He read:

  SIRE, — Deign to heed the warning of one who, not being in your service, nor solicitous of your favours, flatters not your crimes, and yet desires to avert the danger threatening you. There is a plot to assassinate you which would by now have been executed but for the countermanding of the ball at the opera last week. What was not done then will certainly be done to-night if you afford the opportunity. Remain at home and avoid balls and public gatherings for the rest of the year; thus the fanaticism which aims at your life will evaporate.

  “Do you know the writing?” Gustavus asked.

  Bjelke shrugged. “The hand will be disguised, no doubt,” he evaded.

  “But you will heed the warning, Sire?” exclaimed, Armfelt, who had read over the secretary’s shoulder, and whose face had paled in reading.

  Gustavus laughed contemptuously. “Faith, if I were to heed every scaremonger, I should get but little amusement out of life.”

  Yet he was angry, as his shifting colour showed. The disrespectful tone of the anonymous communication moved him more deeply than its actual message. He toyed a moment with a hair-ribbon, his nether lip thrust out in thought. At last he rapped out an oath of vexation, and proffered the ribbon to his valet.

  “My hair, Francois,” said he, “and then we will be going.”

  “Going!”

  It was an ejaculation of horror from Armfelt, whose face was now as white as the ivory-coloured suit he wore.

  “What else? Am I to be intimidated out of my pleasures?” Yet that his heart was less stout than his words his very next question showed. “Apropos, Bjelke, what was the reason why you countermanded the ball last week?”

  “The councillors from Gefle claimed Your Majesty’s immediate attention,” Bjelke reminded him.

  “So you said at the time. But the business seemed none so urgent when we came to it. There was no other reason in your mind — no suspicion?”

  His keen, dark blue eyes were fixed upon the pale masklike face of the secretary.

  That grave, almost stern countenance relaxed into a smile.

  “I suspected no more than I suspect now,” was his easy equivocation. “And all that I suspect now is that some petty enemy is attempting to scare Your Majesty.”

  “To scare me?” Gustavus flushed to the temples. “Am I a man to be scared?”

  “Ah, but consider, Sire, and you, Bjelke,” Armfelt was bleating. “This may be a friendly warning. In all humility, Sire, let me suggest that you incur no risk; that you countermand the masquerade.”

  “And permit the insolent writer to boast that he frightened the King?” sneered Bjelke.

  “Faith, Baron, you are right. The thing is written with intent to make a mock of me.”

  “But if it were not so, Sire?” persisted the distressed Armfelt. And volubly he argued now to impose caution, reminding the King of his enemies, who might, indeed, be tempted to go the lengths of which the anonymous writer spoke. Gustavus listened, and was impressed.

  “If I took heed of every admonition,” he said, “I might as well become a monk at once. And yet—” He took his chin in his hand, and stood t
houghtful, obviously hesitating, his head bowed, his straight, graceful figure motionless.

  Thus until Bjelke, who now desired above all else the very thing he had come hot-foot to avert, broke the silence to undo what Armfelt had done.

  “Sire,” he said, “you may avoid both mockery and danger, and yet attend the masquerade. Be sure, if there is indeed a plot, the assassins will be informed of the disguise you are to wear. Give me your flame-studded domino, and take a plain black one for yourself.”

  Armfelt gasped at the audacity of the proposal, but Gustavus gave no sign that he had heard. He continued standing in that tense attitude, his eyes vague and dreamy. And as if to show along what roads of thought his mind was travelling, he uttered a single word a name — in a questioning voice scarce louder than a whisper.

  Ankarstrom?

  Later again he was to think of Ankarstrom, to make inquiries concerning him, which justifies us here in attempting to follow those thoughts of his. They took the road down which his conscience pointed. Above all Swedes he had cause to fear John Jacobi Ankarstrom, for, foully as he had wronged many men in his time, he had wronged none more deeply than that proud, high-minded nobleman. He hated Ankarstrom as we must always hate those whom we have wronged, and he hated him the more because he knew himself despised by Ankarstrom with a cold and deadly contempt that at every turn proclaimed itself.

  That hatred was more than twenty years old. It dated back to the time when Gustavus had been a vicious youth, and Ankarstrom himself a boy. They were much of an age. Gustavus had put upon his young companion an infamous insult, which had been answered by a blow. His youth and the admitted provocation alone had saved Ankarstrom from the dread consequence of striking a Prince of the Royal Blood. But they had not saved him from the vindictiveness of Gustavus. He had kept his lust of vengeance warm, and very patiently had he watched and waited for his opportunity to destroy the man, who had struck him.

  That chance had come four years ago — in 1788 — during the war with Russia. Ankarstrom commanded the forces defending the island of Gothland. These forces were inadequate for the task, nor was the island in a proper state of defence, being destitute of forts. To have persevered in resistance might have been heroic, but it would have been worse than futile, for not only would it have entailed the massacre of the garrison, but it must have further subjected the inhabitants to all the horrors of sack and pillage.