The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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seemed to them, heaved under their feet, and they were flung
violently forward on their faces. A great blaze rent the darkness
of the night, accompanied by the thunders of an explosion so
terrific that it seemed as if the whole world must have been
shattered by it.
For some instants the King and his page lay half stunned where they
had fallen, and well might it have been for them had they so
continued. But Darnley, recovering, staggered to his feet, pulling
the boy up with him and supporting him. Then, as he began to move,
he heard a soft whistle in the gloom behind him. Over his shoulder
he looked towards the house, to behold a great, smoking gap now
yawning in it. Through this gap he caught a glimpse of shadowy men
moving in the close beyond, and he realized that he had been seen.
The white shirt he wore had betrayed his presence to them.
With a stifled scream, he began to run towards the wall, the page
staggering after him. Behind them now came the clank and thud of
a score of overtaking feet. Soon they were surrounded. The King
turned this way and that, desperately seeking a way out of the
murderous human ring that fenced them round.
“What d’ye seek? What d’ye seek?” he screeched, in a pitiful
attempt to question with authority.
A tall man in a trailing cloak advanced and seized him.
“We seek thee, fool!” said the voice of Bothwell.
The kingliness that he had never known how to wear becomingly now
fell from him utterly.
“Mercy - mercy!” he cried.
“Such mercy as you had on David Rizzio!” answered the Border lord.
Darnley fell on his knees and sought to embrace the murderer’s legs.
Bothwell stooped over him, seized the wretched man’s shirt, and
pulled it from his shivering body; then, flinging the sleeves about
the royal neck, slipped one over the other and drew them tight,
nor relaxed his hold until the young man’s struggles had entirely
ceased.
Four days later, Mary went to visit the body of her husband in the
chapel of Holyrood House, whither it had been conveyed, and there,
as a contemporary tells us, she looked upon it long, “not only
without grief, but with greedy eyes.” Thereafter it was buried
secretly in the night by Rizzio’s side, so that murderer and victim
lay at peace together in the end.
III. THE NIGHT OF BETRAYAL
Antonio Perez and Philip II of Spain
You a Spaniard of Spain?” had been her taunt, dry and contemptuous.
“I do not believe it.”
And upon that she had put spur to the great black horse that bore her
and had ridden off along the precipitous road by the river.
After her he had flung his answer on a note of laughter, bitter and
cynical as the laughter of the damned, laughter that expressed all
things but mirth.
“Oh, a Spaniard of Spain, indeed, Madame la Marquise. Very much a
Spaniard of Spain, I assure you.”
The great black horse and the woman in red flashed round a bend of
the rocky road and were eclipsed by a clump of larches. The man
leaned heavily upon his ebony cane, sighed wearily, and grew
thoughtful. Then, with a laugh and a shrug, he sat down in the
shade of the firs that bordered the road. Behind him, crowning the
heights, loomed the brown castle built by Gaston Phoebus, Count of
Foix, two hundred years ago, and the Tower of Montauzet, its walls
scarred by the shots of the rebellious Biscayans. Below him,
nourished by the snows that were dissolving under the sunshine of
early spring, sped the tumbling river; beyond this spread pasture
and arable land to the distant hills, and beyond those stood the
gigantic sharp-summited wall of the Pyrenees, its long ridge
dominated by the cloven cone of the snow clad Pic du Midi. There
was in the sight of that great barrier, at once natural and
political, a sense of security for this fugitive from the perils
and the hatreds that lurked in Spain beyond. Here in Bearn he was
a king’s guest, enjoying the hospitality of the great Castle of Pau,
safe from the vindictive persecution of the mean tyrant who ruled
in Spain. And here, at last, he was at peace, or would have been
but for the thought of this woman - this Marquise de Chantenac - who
had gone to such lengths in her endeavours to soften his exile that
her ultimate object could never have been in doubt to a coxcomb,
though it was in some doubt to Antonio Perez, who had been cured
for all time of Coxcombry by suffering and misfortune, to say
nothing of increasing age. It was when he bethought him of that
age of his that he was chiefly intrigued by the amazing ardour of
this great lady of Bearn. A dozen years ago - before misfortune
overtook him - he would have accepted her flagrant wooing as a
proper tribute. For then he had been the handsome, wealthy, witty,
profligate Secretary of State to His Catholic Majesty King Philip II,
with a power in Spain second only to the King’s, and sometimes even
greater. In those days he would have welcomed her as her endowments
merited. She was radiantly lovely, in the very noontide of her
resplendent youth, the well-born widow of a gentleman of Bearn. And
it would not have lain within the strength or inclinations of Antonio
Perez, as he once had been, to have resisted the temptation that she
offered. Ever avid of pleasure, he had denied himself no single cup
of it that favouring Fortune had proffered him. It was, indeed,
because of this that he was fallen from his high estate; it was a
woman who had pulled him down in ruin, tumbling with him to her doom.
She, poor soul, was dead at last, which was the best that any lover
could have wished her. But he lived on, embittered, vengeful, with
gall in his veins instead of blood. He was the pale, faded shadow
of that arrogant, reckless, joyous Antonio Perez beloved of Fortune.
He was fifty, gaunt, hollow-eyed, and grey, half crippled by torture,
sickly from long years of incarceration.
What, he asked himself, sitting there, his eyes upon the eternal
snows of the barrier that shut out his past, was there left in him
to awaken love in such a woman as Madame de Chantenac? Was it that
his tribulations stirred her pity, or that the fame of him which
rang through Europe shed upon his withering frame some of the
transfiguring radiance of romance?
It marked, indeed, the change in him that he should pause to
question, whose erstwhile habit had been blindly to accept the good
things tossed by Fortune into his lap. But question he did,
pondering that parting taunt of hers to which, for emphasis, she
had given an odd redundancy - “You a Spaniard of Spain!” Could her
meaning have been plainer? Was not a Spaniard proverbially as quick
to love as to jealousy? Was not Spain, that scented land of warmth
and colour, of cruelty and blood, of throbbing lutes under lattices
ajar, of mitred sinners doing public penance, that land where lust
and piety went hand in hand, where passion and penitence lay down
together - was not Spain the land of love’s most fruitful growth?
And was not a Spaniard the very hierophant of love?
His thoughts swung with sudden yearning to his wife Juana and their
children, held in brutal captivity by Philip, who sought to slake
upon them some of the vindictiveness from which their husband and
father had at last escaped. Not that Antonio Perez observed marital
fidelity more closely than any other Spaniard of his time, or of any
time. But Antonio Perez was growing old, older than he thought,
older than his years. He knew it. Madame de Chantenac had proved
it to him.
She had reproached him with never coming to see her at Chantenac,
neglecting to return the too assiduous visits that she paid him
here at Pau.
“You are very beautiful, madame, and the world is very foul,” he
had excused himself. “Believe one who knows the world, to his
bitter cost. Tongues will wag.”
“And your Spanish pride will not suffer that clods may talk of you?”
“I am thinking of you, madame.”
“Of me?” she had answered. “Why, of me they talk already - talk
their fill. I must pretend blindness to the leering eyes that watch
me each time I come to Pau; feign unconsciousness of the impertinent
glances of the captain of the castle there as I ride in.”
“Then why do you come?” he had asked point-blank. But before her
sudden change of countenance he had been quick to add: “Oh, madame,
I am full conscious of the charity that brings you, and I am deeply,
deeply grateful; but - “
“Charity?” she had interrupted sharply, on a laugh that was
self-mocking. “Charity?”
“What else, madame?”
“Ask yourself,” she had answered, reddening and averting her face
from his questioning eyes.
“Madame,” he had faltered, “I dare not.”
“Dare not?”
“Madame, how should I? I am an old man, broken by sickness,
disheartened by misfortune, daunted by tribulation - a mere husk
cast aside by Fortune, whilst you are lovely as one of the angels
about the Throne of Heaven.”
She had looked into the haggard face, into the scars of suffering
that seared it, and she had answered gently: “Tomorrow you shall
come to me at Chantenac, my friend.”
“I am a Spaniard, for whom to-morrow never comes.”
“But it will this time. Tomorrow I shall expect you.”
He looked up at her sitting her great black horse beside which he
had been pacing.
“Better not, madame! Better not!” he had said.
And then he saw the eyes that had been tender grow charged with
scorn; then came her angry taunt:
“You a Spaniard of Spain! I do not believe it!”
Oh, there was no doubt that he had angered her. Women of her
temperament are quick to anger as to every emotion. But he had not
wished to anger her. God knows it was never the way of Antonio
Perez to anger lovely women - at least not in this fashion. And it
was an ill return for her gentleness and attention to himself.
Considering this as he sat there now, he resolved that he must make
amends - the only amends it was possible to make.
An hour later, in one of the regal rooms of the castle, where he
enjoyed the hospitality of King Henri IV of France and Navarre, he
announced to that most faithful equerry, Gil de Mesa, his intention
of riding to Chantenac to-morrow.
“Is it prudent?” quoth Mesa, frowning.
“Most imprudent,” answered Don Antonio. “That is why I go.”
And on the morrow he went, escorted by a single groom. Gil de Mesa
had begged at first to be allowed to accompany him. But for Gil he
had other work, of which the instructions he left were very full.
The distance was short - three miles along the Gave de Pau - and Don
Antonio covered it on a gently ambling mule, such as might have been
bred to bear some aged dignitary of Holy Church.
The lords of Chantenac were as noble, as proud, and as poor as most
great lords of Bearn. Their lineage was long, their rent-rolls
short. And the last marquis had suffered more from this dual
complaint than any of his forbears, and he had
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