“Shall I tell you my thought?” she asked. “Shall I dare to tell you it?”
“Tell it me!”
“God has died to-night. Hush! Do not move! Do not speak! Perhaps the world will slip and crumble if we but stay still.” And they remained thus cheek to cheek silent in the room, staring forward with eyes wide open and hopeful. The very air seemed to them a-quiver with expectation. They, too, had an expectant smile upon their lips. But there was no crack of thunder overhead, no roar of a slipping world.
“CHEEK TO CHEEK, SILENT IN THE ROOM, STARING FORWARD WITH EYES WIDE OPEN AND HOPEFUL.” — Page 136.
The Chevalier was the first to move.
“But we are children,” he cried, starting up. “Is it not strange the very pain which tortures us because we are man and woman should sink us into children? We sit hoping that a miracle will split the world in pieces! This is the Caprara Palace; Whittington drowses outside over his lantern; and to-morrow Gaydon rides with his passport northwards to Charles Wogan.”
The name hurt Maria Vittoria like a physical torture. She beat her hands together with a cry, “I hate him! I hate him!”
“Yet I have no better servant!”
“Speak no good word of him in my ears! He robs me of you.”
“He risks his life for me.”
“I will pray that he may lose it.”
“Maria!”
The Chevalier started, thrilled and almost appalled by the violence of her passion.
“I do pray,” she cried. “Every fibre in me tingles with the prayer. Oh, I hate him! Why did you give him leave to rescue her?”
“Could I refuse? I did delay him; I did hesitate. Only to-day Gaydon receives the passport, and even so I have delayed too long. Indeed, Maria, I dare not think of the shame, the danger, her Highness has endured for me, lest my presence here, even for this farewell, should too bitterly reproach me.”
At that all Maria Vittoria’s vehemence left her. She fell to beseechings and entreaties. With her vehemence went also her dignity. She dropped upon her knees and dragged herself across the room to him. To James her humility was more terrible than her passion, for passion had always distinguished her, and he was familiar with it; but pride had always gone hand in hand with it. He stepped forward and would have raised her from the ground, but Maria would have none of his help; she crouched at his feet pleading.
“You told me business would call you to Spain. Go there! Stay there! For a little — oh, not for long! But for a month, say, after your Princess comes triumphing into Bologna. Promise me that! I could not bear that you should meet her as she comes. There would be shouts; I can hear them. No, I will not have it! I can see her proud cursed face a-flush. No! You think too much of what she has suffered. If I could have suffered too! But suffering, shame, humiliation, these fall to women, always have fallen. We have learnt to bear them so that we feel them less than you. My dear lord, believe me! Her suffering is no great thing. If we love we welcome it! Each throb of pain endured for love becomes a thrill of joy. If I could have suffered too!”
It was strange to hear this girl with the streaming eyes and tormented face bewail her fate in that she had not won that great privilege of suffering. She knelt on the ground a splendid image of pain, and longed for pain that she might prove thereby how little a thing she made of it. The Chevalier drew a stool to her side and seating himself upon it clasped her about the waist. She laid her cheek upon his knee just as a dog will do.
“Sweetheart,” said he, “I would have no woman suffer a pang for me had I my will of the world. But since that may not be, I do not believe that any woman could be deeper hurt than you are now.”
“Not Clementina?”
“No.”
Maria uttered a little sigh. Her pain gave her a sort of ownership of the man who caused it. “Nor can she love as deep,” she continued quietly. “A Sobieski from the snows! Love was born here in Italy. She robs me of you. I hate her.” Then she raised her face eagerly. “Charles Wogan may fail.”
“You do not know him.”
“The cleverest have made mistakes and died for them.”
“Wogan makes mistakes like another, but somehow gets the better of them in the end. There was a word he said to me when he begged for my permission. I told him his plan was a mere dream. He answered he would dream it true; he will.”
“You should have waked him. You were the master, he the servant. You were the King.”
“And when can the King do what he wills instead of what he must? Maria, if you and I had met before I sent Charles Wogan to search out a wife for me—”
Maria Vittoria knelt up. She drew herself away.
“He chose her as your wife?”
“If only I had had time to summon him back!”
“He chose her — Charles Wogan. How I hate him!”
“I sent him to make the choice.”
“And he might have gone no step beyond Bologna. There was I not a mile distant ready to his hand! But I was too mean, too despicable—”
“Maria, hush!” And the troubled voice in which he spoke rang with so much pain that she was at once contrite with remorse.
“My lord, I hurt you, so you see how I am proven mean. Give me your hand and laugh to me; laugh with your heart and eyes and lips. I am jealous of your pain. I am a woman. I would have it all, gather it all into my bosom, and cherish each sharp stab like a flower my lover gives to me. I am glad of them. They are flowers that will not wither. Add a kiss, sweetheart, the sharpest stab, and so the chief flower, the very rose of flowers. There, that is well,” and she rose from her knees and turned away. So she stood for a little, and when she turned again she wore upon her face the smile which she had bidden rise in his.
“Would we were free!” cried the Chevalier.
“But since we are not, let us show brave faces to the world and hide our hearts. I do wish you all happiness. But you will go to Spain. There’s a friend’s hand in warrant of the wish.”
She held out a hand which clasped his firmly without so much as a tremor.
“Good-night, my friend,” said she. “Speak those same words to me, and no word more. I am tired with the day’s doings. I have need of sleep, oh, great need of it!”
The Chevalier read plainly the overwhelming strain her counterfeit of friendliness put upon her. He dared not prolong it. Even as he looked at her, her lips quivered and her eyes swam.
“Good-night, my friend,” said he.
She conducted him along a wide gallery to the great staircase where her lackeys waited. Then he bowed to her and she curtsied low to him, but no word was spoken by either. This little comedy must needs be played in pantomime lest the actors should spoil it with a show of broken hearts.
Maria Vittoria went back to the room. She could have hindered Wogan if she had had the mind. She had the time to betray him; she knew of his purpose. But the thought of betrayal never so much as entered her thoughts.
She hated him, she hated Clementina, but she was loyal to her King. She sat alone in her palace, her chin propped upon her hands, and in a little in her wide unblinking eyes the tears gathered again and rolled down her cheeks and on her hands. She wept silently and without a movement, like a statue weeping.
The Chevalier found Whittington waiting for him, but the candle in his lantern had burned out.
“I have kept you here a wearisome long time,” he said with an effort. It was not easy for him to speak upon an indifferent matter.
“I had some talk with Major Gaydon which helped me to beguile it,” said Whittington.
“Gaydon!” exclaimed the Chevalier, “are you certain?”
“A man may make mistakes in the darkness,” said Whittington.
“To be sure.”
“And I never had an eye for faces.”
“It was not Gaydon, then?” said the Chevalier.
“It may not have been,” said Whittington, “and by the best of good fortune I said nothing to him of any significance
whatever.”
The Chevalier was satisfied with the reply. He had chosen the right attendant for this nocturnal visit. Had Gaydon met with a more observant man than Whittington outside the Caprara Palace, he might have got a number of foolish suspicions into his head.
Gaydon, however, was at that moment in his bed, saying to himself that there were many matters concerning which it would be an impertinence for him to have one meddlesome thought. By God’s blessing he was a soldier and no politician. He fell asleep comforted by that conclusion.
In the morning Edgar, the Chevalier’s secretary, came privately to him.
“The King will receive you now,” said he. “Let us go.”
“It is broad daylight. We shall be seen.”
“Not if the street is empty,” said Edgar, looking out of the window.
The street, as it chanced, was for the moment empty. Edgar crossed the street and rapped quickly with certain pauses between the raps on the door of that deserted house into which Gaydon had watched men enter. The door was opened. “Follow me,” said Edgar. Gaydon followed him into a bare passage unswept and with discoloured walls. A man in a little hutch in the wall opened and closed the door with a string.
Edgar walked forward to the end of the passage with Gaydon at his heels. The two men came to a flight of stone steps, which they descended. The steps led to a dark and dripping cellar with no pavement but the mud, and that depressed into puddles. The air was cold and noisome; the walls to the touch of Gaydon’s hand were greasy with slime. He followed Edgar across the cellar into a sort of tunnel. Here Edgar drew an end of candle from his pocket and lighted it. The tunnel was so low that Gaydon, though a shortish man, could barely hold his head erect. He followed Edgar to the end and up a flight of winding steps. The air grew warmer and dryer. They had risen above ground, the spiral wound within the thickness of a wall. The steps ended abruptly; there was no door visible; in face of them and on each side the bare stone walls enclosed them. Edgar stooped down and pressed with his finger on a round insignificant discolouration of the stone. Then he stood up again.
“You will breathe no word of this passage, Major Gaydon,” said he. “The house was built a century ago when Rome was more troubled than it is to-day, but the passage was never more useful than now. Men from England, whose names it would astonish you to know, have trodden these steps on a secret visit to the King. Ah!” From the wall before their faces a great slab of the size of a door sank noiselessly down and disclosed a wooden panel. The panel slid aside. Edgar and Gaydon stepped into a little cabinet lighted by a single window. The room was empty. Gaydon took a peep out of the window and saw the Tiber eddying beneath. Edgar went to a corner and touched a spring. The stone slab rose from its grooves; the panel slid back across it; at the same moment the door of the room was opened, and the Chevalier stepped across the threshold.
Gaydon could no longer even pretend to doubt who had walked with Whittington to the Caprara Palace the night before. It was none of his business, however, he assured himself. If his King dwelt with emphasis upon the dangers of the enterprise, it was not his business to remark upon it or to be thereby disheartened. The King said very graciously that he would hold the major and his friends in no less esteem if by any misfortune they came back empty-handed. That was most kind of him, but it was none of Gaydon’s business. The King was ill at ease and looked as though he had not slept a wink the livelong night. Well, swollen eyes and a patched pallid face disfigure all men at times, and in any case they were none of Gaydon’s business.
He rode out of Rome that afternoon as the light was failing. He rode at a quick trot, and did not notice at the corner of a street a big stalwart man who sauntered along swinging his stick by the tassel with a vacant look of idleness upon the passers-by. He stopped and directed the same vacant look at Gaydon.
But he was thinking curiously, “Will he tell Charles Wogan?”
The stalwart man was Harry Whittington.
Gaydon, however, never breathed a word about the Caprara Palace when he handed the passport to Charles Wogan at Schlestadt. Wogan was sitting propped up with pillows in a chair, and he asked Gaydon many questions of the news at Rome, and how the King bore himself.
“The King was not in the best of spirits,” said Gaydon.
“With this,” cried Wogan, flourishing the passport, “we’ll find a means to hearten him.”
Gaydon filled a pipe and lighted it.
“Will you tell me, Wogan,” he asked,— “I am by nature curious, — was it the King who proposed this enterprise to you, or was it you who proposed it to the King?”
The question had an extraordinary effect. Wogan was startled out of his chair.
“What do you mean?” he exclaimed fiercely. There was something more than fierceness in the words, — an accent of fear, it almost seemed to Gaydon. There was a look almost of fear in his eyes, as though he had let some appalling secret slip. Gaydon stared at him in wonder, and Wogan recovered himself with a laugh. “Faith,” said he, “it is a question to perplex a man. I misdoubt but we both had the thought about the same time. ‘Wogan,’ said he, ‘there’s the Princess with a chain on her leg, so to speak,’ and I answered him, ‘A chain’s a galling sort of thing to a lady’s ankle.’ There was little more said if I remember right.”
Gaydon nodded as though his curiosity was now satisfied. Wogan’s alarm was strange, no doubt, strange and unexpected like the Chevalier’s visit to the Caprara Palace. Gaydon had a glimpse of dark and troubled waters, but he turned his face away. They were none of his business.
CHAPTER X
IN AN HOUR, however, he returned out of breath and with a face white from despair. Wogan was still writing at his table, but at his first glance towards Gaydon he started quickly to his feet, and altogether forgot to cover over his sheet of paper. He carefully shut the door.
“You have bad news,” said he.
“There was never worse,” answered Gaydon. He had run so fast, he was so discomposed, that he could with difficulty speak. But he gasped his bad news out in the end.
“I went to my brother major to report my return. He was entertaining his friends. He had a letter this morning from Strasbourg and he read it aloud. The letter said a rumour was running through the town that the Chevalier Wogan had already rescued the Princess and was being hotly pursued on the road to Trent.”
If Wogan felt any disquietude he was careful to hide it. He sat comfortably down upon the sofa.
“I expected rumour would be busy with us,” said he, “but never that it would take so favourable a shape.”
“Favourable!” exclaimed Gaydon.
“To be sure, for its falsity will be established to-morrow, and ridicule cast upon those who spread and believed it. False alarms are the proper strategy to conceal the real assault. The rumour does us a service. Our secret is very well kept, for here am I in Schlestadt, and people living in Schlestadt believe me on the road to Trent. I will go back with you to the major’s and have a laugh at his correspondent. Courage, my friend. We will give our enemies a month. Let them cry wolf as often as they will during that month, we’ll get into the fold all the more easily in the end.”
Wogan took his hat to accompany Gaydon, but at that moment he heard another man stumbling in a great haste up the stairs. Misset broke into the room with a face as discomposed as Gaydon’s had been.
“Here’s another who has heard the same rumour,” said Wogan.
“It is more than a rumour,” said Misset. “It is an order, and most peremptory, from the Court of France, forbidding any officer of Dillon’s regiment to be absent for more than twenty-four hours from his duties on pain of being broke. Our secret’s out. That’s the plain truth of the matter.”
He stood by the table drumming with his fingers in a great agitation. Then his fingers stopped. He had been drumming upon Wogan’s sheet of paper, and the writing on the sheet had suddenly attracted his notice. It was writing in unusually regular lines. Gaydon, arrested b
y Misset’s change from restlessness to fixity, looked that way for a second, too, but he turned his head aside very quickly. Wogan’s handwriting was none of his business.
“We will give them a month,” said Wogan, who was conjecturing at the motive of this order from the Court of France. “No doubt we are suspected. I never had a hope that we should not be. The Court of France, you see, can do no less than forbid us, but I should not be surprised if it winks at us on the sly. We will give them a month. Colonel Lally is a friend of mine and a friend of the King. We will get an abatement of that order, so that not one of you shall be cashiered.”
“I don’t flinch at that,” said Misset, “but the secret’s out.”
“Then we must use the more precautions,” said Wogan. He had no doubt whatever that somehow he would bring the Princess safely out of her prison to Bologna. It could not be that she was born to be wasted. Misset, however, was not so confident upon the matter.
“A strange, imperturbable man is Charles Wogan,” said he to Gaydon and O’Toole the same evening. “Did you happen by any chance to cast your eye over the paper I had my hand on?”
“I did not,” said Gaydon, in a great hurry. “It was a private letter, no doubt.”
“It was poetry. There’s no need for you to hurry, my friend. It was more than mere poetry, it was in Latin. I read the first line on the page, and it ran, ‘Te, dum spernit, arat novus accola; max ubi cultam—’”
Gaydon tore his arm away from Misset. “I’ll hear no more of it,” he cried. “Poetry is none of my business.”
“There, Dick, you are wrong,” said O’Toole, sententiously. Both Misset and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared. Never had poetry so strange an advocate. O’Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo. He rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear to ear. “Yes, I’ve done it,” said he; “I’ve written poetry. It is a thing a polite gentleman should be able to do. So I did it. It wasn’t in Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn’t understand Latin. Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to ‘juicy,’ and the pleasure of it made her purple in the face. There were to have been four lines, but there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of a suitable rhyme to O’Toole. Lucy said she knew one, but she would never tell it me.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 344