Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  He was about, I think, to question me further, when the Duchess looked up, and said something to him and he something to her. She spoke again and he answered. Then he nodded assent. “You would fain stand on your own feet?” he cried to me. “Is that so?”

  “It is, sire,” I answered.

  “Then so be it!” he replied loudly, looking round on the throng with a frown. “I will ennoble you. You would have died for your lord and friend, and therefore I give you a rood of land in the common graveyard of Santon to hold of me, and I name you Von Santonkirch. And I, William, Duke of Cleves, Julich and Guelders, prince of the Empire, declare you noble, and give you for your arms three swords of justice; and the motto you may buy of a clerk! Further, let this decree be enrolled in my Chancery. Are you satisfied?”

  As I dropped on my knees, my eyes sparkling, there was a momentary disturbance behind me. It was caused by the abrupt entrance of the Sub-dean. He took in part of the situation at a glance; that is, he saw me kneeling before the Duke. But he could not see the Duchess of Suffolk, the Duke’s figure being interposed. As he came forward, the crowd making way for him, he cast an angry glance at me, and scarcely smoothed his brow even to address the prince. “I am glad that your highness has not done what was reported to me,” he said hastily, his obeisance brief and perfunctory. “I heard an uproar in the town, and was told that this man was pardoned.”

  “It is so!” said the Duke curtly, eying the ecclesiastic with no great favor. “He is pardoned.”

  “Only in part, I presume,” the priest rejoined urgently. “Or, if otherwise, I am sure that your highness has not received certain information with which I can furnish you.”

  “Furnish away, sir,” quoth the Duke, yawning.

  “I have had letters from my Lord Bishop of Arras respecting him.”

  “Respecting him!” exclaimed the prince, starting and bending his brows in surprise.

  “Respecting those in whose company he travels,” the priest answered hastily. “They are represented to me as dangerous persons, pestilent refugees from England, and obnoxious alike to the Emperor, the Prince of Spain, and the Queen of England.”

  “I wonder you do not add also to the King of France and the Soldan of Turkey!” growled the Duke. “Pish! I am not going to be dictated to by Master Granvelle — no, nor by his master, be he ten times Emperor! Go to! Go to! Master Sub-dean! You forget yourself, and so does your master the Bishop. I will have you know that these people are not what you think them. Call you my cousin, the widow of the consort of the late Queen of France, an obnoxious person? Fie! Fie! You forget yourself!”

  He moved as he stopped speaking, so that the astonished churchman found himself confronted on a sudden by the smiling, defiant Duchess. The Sub-dean started and his face fell, for, seeing her seated in the Duke’s presence, he discerned at once that the game was played out. Yet he rallied himself, bethinking him, I fancy, that there were many spectators. He made a last effort. “The Bishop of Arras — —” he began.

  “Pish!” scoffed the Duke, interrupting him.

  “The Bishop of Arras — —” the priest repeated firmly.

  “I would he were hung with his own tapestry!” retorted the Duke, with a brutal laugh.

  “Heaven forbid!” replied the ecclesiastic, his pale face reddening and his eyes darting baleful glances at me. But he took the hint, and henceforth said no more of the Bishop. Instead, he continued smoothly, “Your highness has, of course, considered the danger — the danger, I mean, of provoking neighbors so powerful by shielding this lady and making her cause your own. You will remember, sir — —”

  “I will remember Innspruck!” roared the Duke, in a rage, “where the Emperor, ay, and your everlasting Bishop too, fled before a handful of Protestants, like sheep before wolves. A fig for your Emperor! I never feared him young, and I fear him less now that he is old and decrepit and, as men say, mad. Let him get to his watches, and you to your prayers. If there were not this table between us, I would pull your ears, Master Churchman!”

  * * * * *

  “But tell me,” I asked Master Bertie as I stood beside his couch an hour later, “how did the Duchess manage it? I gathered from something you or she said, a short time back, that you had no influence with the Duke of Cleves.”

  “Not quite that,” he answered. “My wife and the late Duke of Suffolk had much to do with wedding the Prince’s sister to King Henry, thirteen — fourteen years back, is it? And so far we might have felt confident of his protection. But the marriage turned out ill, or turned out short, and Queen Anne of Cleves was divorced. And — well, we felt a little less confident on that account, particularly as he has the name of a headstrong, passionate man.”

  “Heaven keep him in it!” I said, smiling. “But you have not told me yet what happened.”

  “The Duchess was still asleep this morning, fairly worn out, as you may suppose, when a great noise awoke her. She got up and went to Dymphna, and learned it was the Duke’s trumpets. Then she went to the window, and, seeing few people in the streets to welcome him, inquired why this was. Dymphna broke down at that, and told her what was happening to you, and that you were to die at that very hour. She went out straightway, without covering her head, — you know how impetuous she is, — and flung herself on her knees in the mud before the Duke’s horse as he entered. He knew her, and the rest you can guess.”

  Can guess? Ah, what happiness it was! Outside, the sun fell hotly on the steep red roofs, with their rows of casements, and on the sleepy square, in which knots of people still lingered, talking of the morning’s events. I could see below me the guard which Duke William, shrewdly mistrusting the Sub-dean, had posted in front of the house, nominally to do the Duchess honor. I could hear in the next room the cheerful voices of my friends. What happiness it was to live! What happiness to be loved! How very, very good and beautiful and glorious a world, seemed the world to me on that old May morning in that quaint German town which we had entered so oddly!

  As I turned from the window full of thankfulness, my eyes met those of Mistress Anne, who was sitting on the far side of the sick man’s couch, the baby in a cradle beside her. The risk and exposure of the last week had made a deeper mark upon her than upon any of us. She was paler, graver, older, more of a woman and less, much less, of a girl. And she looked very ill. Her eyes, in particular, seemed to have grown larger, and as they dwelt on me now there was a strange and solemn light in them, under which I grew uneasy.

  “You have been wonderfully preserved,” she said presently, speaking dreamily, and as much to herself as to me.

  “I have, indeed,” I answered, thinking she referred only to my escape of the morning.

  But she did not.

  “There was, firstly, the time on the river when you were hurt with the oar,” she continued, gazing absently at me, her hands in her lap; “and then the night when you saw Clarence with Dymphna.”

  “Or, rather, saw him without her,” I interposed, smiling. It was strange that she should mention it as a fact, when at the time she had so scolded me for making the statement.

  “And then,” she continued, disregarding my interruption, “there was the time when you were stabbed in the passage; and again when you had the skirmish by the river; and then to-day you were within a minute of death. You have been wonderfully preserved!”

  “I have,” I assented thoughtfully. “The more as I suspect that I have to thank Master Clarence for all these little adventures.”

  “Strange — very strange!” she muttered, removing her eyes from me that she might fix them on the floor.

  “What is strange?”

  The abrupt questioner was the Duchess, who came bustling in at the moment. “What is strange?” she repeated, with a heightened color and dancing eyes. “Shall I tell you?” She paused and looked brightly at me, holding something concealed behind her. I guessed in a moment, from the aspect of her face, what it was: the letter which I had given to Master Lindstrom in the morni
ng, and which, with a pardonable forgetfulness, I had failed to reclaim.

  I turned very red. “It was not intended for you now,” I said shyly. For in the letter I had told her my story.

  “Pooh! pooh!” she cried. “It is just as I thought. A pretty piece of folly! No,” she continued, as I opened my mouth, “I am not going to keep your secret, sir. You may go down on your knees. It will be of no use. Richard, you remember Sir Anthony Cludde of Coton End in Warwickshire?”

  “Oh, yes,” her husband said, rising on his elbow, while his face lit up, and I stood bashfully, shifting my feet.

  “I have danced with him a dozen times, years ago!” she continued, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Well, sir, this gentleman, Master Francis Carey, otherwise Von Santonkirch, is Francis Cludde, his nephew!”

  “Sir Anthony’s nephew?”

  “Yes, and the son of Ferdinand Cludde, whom you also have heard of, of whom the less — —”

  She stopped, and turned quickly, interrupted by a half-stifled scream. It was a scream full of sudden horror and amazement and fear; and it came from Mistress Anne. The girl had risen, and was gazing at me with distended eyes and blanched cheeks, and hands stretched out to keep me off — gazing, indeed, as if she saw in me some awful portent or some dreadful threat. She did not speak, but she began, without taking her eyes from me, to retreat toward the door.

  “Hoity toity!” cried my lady, stamping her foot in anger. “What has happened to the girl? What — —”

  What, indeed? The Duchess stopped, still more astonished. For, without uttering a word of explanation or apology, Mistress Anne had reached the door, groped blindly for the latch, found it, and gone out, her eyes, with the same haunted look of horror in them, fixed on me to the last.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  A LETTER THAT HAD MANY ESCAPES.

  “Hoity, toity!” the Duchess cried again, looking from one to another of us when Anne had disappeared. “What has come to the little fool? Has she gone crazy?”

  I shook my head, too completely at sea even to hazard a conjecture. Master Bertie shook his head also, keeping his eyes glued to the door, as if he could not believe Anne had really gone.

  “I said nothing to frighten her!” my lady protested.

  “Nothing at all,” I answered. For how should the announcement that my real name was Cludde terrify Mistress Anne Brandon nearly out of her senses?

  “Well, no,” Master Bertie agreed, his thoughtful face more thoughtful than usual; “so far as I heard, you said nothing. But I think, my dear, that you had better follow her and learn what it is. She must be ill.”

  The Duchess sat down. “I will go by-and-by,” she said coolly, at which I was not much surprised, for I have always remarked that women have less sympathy with other women’s ailments, especially of the nerves, than have men.

  “For the moment I want to scold this brave, silly boy here!” she continued, looking so kindly at me that I blushed again, and forgot all about Mistress Anne. “To think of him leaving his home to become a wandering squire of dames merely because his father was a — well, not quite what he would have liked him to be! I remember something about him,” she continued, pursing up her lips, and nodding her head at us. “I fancied him dead, however, years ago. But there! if every one whose father were not quite to his liking left home and went astraying, Master Francis, all sensible folk would turn innkeepers, and make their fortunes.”

  “It was not only that which drove me from home,” I explained. “The Bishop of Winchester gave me clearly to understand — —”

  “That Coton was not the place for you!” exclaimed my lady scornfully. “He is a sort of connection of yours, is he not? Oh, I know. And he thinks he has a kind of reversionary interest in the property! With you and your father out of the way, and only your girl cousin left, his interest is much more likely to come to hand. Do you see?”

  I recalled what Martin Luther had said about the cuckoo. But I have since thought that probably they both wronged Stephen Gardiner in this. He was not a man of petty mind, and his estate was equal to his high place. I think it more likely that his motive in removing me from Coton was chiefly the desire to use my services abroad, in conjunction perhaps with some remoter and darker plan for eventually devoting the Cludde property to the Church. Such an act of piety would have been possible had Sir Anthony died leaving his daughter unmarried, and would certainly have earned for the Chancellor Queen Mary’s lasting favor. I think it the more likely to have been in his mind because his inability to persuade the gentry to such acts of restitution — King Harry had much enriched us — was always a sore point with the Queen, and more than once exposed him to her resentment.

  “The strangest thing of all,” the Duchess continued with alacrity, “seems to me to be this: that if he had not meddled with you, he would not have had his plans in regard to us thwarted. If he had not driven you from home, you would never have helped me to escape from London, nor been with us to foil his agents.”

  “A higher power than the Chancellor arranged that!” said Master Bertie emphatically.

  “Well, at any rate, I am glad that you are you!” the Duchess answered, rising gayly. “A Cludde? Why, one feels at home again. And yet,” she continued, her lips trembling suddenly, and her eyes filling with tears as she looked at me, “there was never house raised yet on nobler deed than yours.”

  “Go! go! go!” cried her husband, seeing my embarrassment. “Go and look to that foolish girl!”

  “I will! Yet stop!” cried my lady, pausing when she was half way across the floor, and returning, “I was forgetting that I have another letter to open. It is very odd that this letter was never opened before,” she continued, producing that which had lain in my haversack. “It has had several narrow escapes. But this time I vow I will see inside it. You give me leave?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, smiling. “I wash my hands of it. Whoever the Mistress Clarence to whom it is addressed may be, it is enough that her name is Clarence! We have suffered too much at his hands.”

  “I open it, then!” my lady cried dramatically. I nodded. She took her husband’s dagger and cut the green silk which bound the packet, and opened and read.

  Only a few words. Then she stopped, and looking off the paper, shivered. “I do not understand this,” she murmured. “What does it mean?”

  “No good! I’ll be sworn!” Master Bertie replied, gazing at her eagerly. “Read it aloud, Katherine.”

  “‘To Mistress A —— B —— . I am advertised by my trusty agent, Master Clarence, that he hath benefited much by your aid in the matter in which I have employed him. Such service goeth always for much, and never for naught, with me. In which belief confirm yourself. For the present, working with him as heretofore, be secret, and on no account let your true sentiments come to light. So you will be the more valuable to me, even as it is more easy to unfasten a barred door from within than from without.’”

  Here the Duchess broke off abruptly, and turned on us a face full of wonder. “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “Is that all?” her husband said.

  “Not quite,” she answered, returning to it, and reading:

  “‘Those whom you have hitherto served have too long made a mockery of sacred things, but their cup is full and the business of seeing that they drink it lieth with me, who am not wont to be slothful in these matters. Be faithful and secret. Good speed and fare you well. — Ste. Winton.”

  “One thing is quite clear!” said Master Bertie slowly. “That you and I are the persons whose cup is full. You remember how you once dressed up a dog in a rochet, and dandled it before Gardiner? And it is our matter in which Clarence is employed. Then who is it who has been cooperating with him, and whose aid is of so much value to him?”

  “‘Even as it is easier,’” I muttered thoughtfully, “‘to unfasten a barred door from within than from without.” What was it of which that strange sentence reminded me? Ha! I had it. Of the night on which we had
fled from Master Lindstrom’s house, when Mistress Anne had been seized with that odd fit of perverseness, and had almost opened the door looking upon the river in spite of all I could say or do. It was of that the sentence reminded me. “To whom is it addressed?” I asked abruptly.

  “To Mistress Clarence,” my lady answered.

  “No; inside, I mean.”

  “Oh! to Mistress A —— B —— . But that gives us no clew,” she added. “It is a disguise. You see they are the two first letters of the alphabet.”

  So they were. And the initial letters of Anne Brandon! I wondered that the Duchess did not see it, that she did not at once turn her suspicions toward the right quarter. But she was, for a woman, singularly truthful and confiding. And she saw nothing.

  I looked at Master Bertie. He seemed puzzled, discerning, I fancy, how strangely the allusions pointed to Mistress Anne, but not daring at once to draw the inference. She was his wife’s kinswoman by marriage — albeit a distant one — and much indebted to her. She had been almost as his own sister. She was young and fair, and to associate treachery and ingratitude such as this with her seemed almost too horrible.

  Then why was I so clear sighted as to read the riddle? Why was I the first to see the truth? Because I had felt for days a vague and ill-defined distrust of the girl. I had seen more of her odd fits and caprices than had the others. Looking back now I could find a confirmation of my idea in a dozen things which had befallen us. I remembered how ill and stricken she had looked on the day when I had first brought out the letter, and how strangely she had talked to me about it. I remembered Clarence’s interview with, not Dymphna, — as I had then thought, — but, as I now guessed, Anne, wearing her cloak. I recalled the manner in which she had used me to persuade Master Bertie to take the Wesel instead of the Santon road; no doubt she had told Clarence to follow in that direction, if by any chance we escaped him on the island. And her despair when she heard in the church porch that I had killed Clarence at the ford! And her utter abandonment to fear — poor guilty thing! — when she thought that all her devices had only led her with us to a dreadful death! These things, in the light in which I now viewed them, were cogent evidences against her.