The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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herself - but in nothing else. He was a weedy, unhealthy-looking
man, weakly of frame, rachitic, undersized, with spindle-shanks,
and a countenance that was almost grotesque, with its protruding
jaw, gaping mouth, great, doglike eyes, and yellow tuft of beard.
A great king, perhaps, this Philip, having so been born; but a
ridiculous man and an unspeakable lover. And yet this incomparable
woman seemed to love him.
Let me pass on. For ten years I nursed that love of mine in secret.
I was helped, perhaps, by the fact that in the mean time I had
married - oh, just as Eboli himself had married, an arrangement
dictated by worldly considerations - and no better, truer mate did
ever a man find than I in Juana Coello. We had children and we
were happy, and for a season - for years, indeed - I began to think
that my unspoken passion for the Princess of Eboli was dead and done
with. I saw her rarely now, and my activities increased with
increasing duties. At twenty-six I was one of the Ministers of the
Crown, and one of the chief supporters of that party of which Eboli
was the leader in Spanish politics. I sat in Philip’s Council, and
I came under the spell of that taciturn, suspicious man, who,
utterly unlovable as he was, had yet an uncanny power of inspiring
devotion. From the spell of it I never quite escaped until after
long years of persecution. Yet the discovery that one by nature so
entirely antipathetic to me should have obtained such sway over my
mind helped me to understand Anne’s attachment to him.
When Eboli died, in 1573, I had so advanced in ability and Royal
favour that I took his place as Secretary of State, thus becoming
all but the supreme ruler of Spain. I do not believe that there
was ever in Spain a Minister so highly favoured by the reigning
Prince, so powerful as I became. Not Eboli himself in his halcyon
days had been so deeply esteemed of Philip, or had wielded such
power as I now made my own. All Europe knows it - for it was to me
all Europe addressed itself for affairs that concerned the Catholic
King.
And with my power came wealth - abundant, prodigious wealth. I was
housed like a Prince of the blood, and no Prince of the blood ever
kept greater state than I, was ever more courted, fawned upon, or
t flattered. And remember I was young, little more than thirty,
with all the strength and zest to enjoy my intoxicating eminence.
I was to my party what Eboli had been, though the nominal leader of
it remained Quiroga, Archbishop of Toledo. On the other side was
the Duke of Alva with his following.
You must know that it was King Philip’s way to encourage two rival
parties in the State, between which he shared his confidence and
sway. Thus he stimulated emulation and enlightened his own views
in the opposing opinions that were placed before him. But the
power of my party was absolute in those days, and Alva himself was
as the dust beneath our feet.
Such eminences, they say, are perilous. Heads that are very highly
placed may at any moment be placed still higher - upon a pike. I
am all but a living witness to the truth of that, and yet I wonder
would it so have fallen out with me had I mistrusted that slumbering
passion of mine for Anne. I should have known that where such fires
have once been kindled in a man they never quite die out as long as
life endures. Time and preoccupations may overlay them as with a
film of ashes, but more or less deeply down they smoulder on, and
the first breath will fan them into flame again.
It was at the King’s request I went to see her in her fine Madrid
house opposite Santa Maria Mayor some months after her husband’s
death. There were certain matters of heritage to be cleared up,
and, having regard to her high rank, it was Philip’s wish that I
- who was by now Eboli’s official successor - should wait on her
in person.
There were documents to be conned and signed, and the matter took
some days, for Eboli’s possessions were not only considerable, but
scattered, and his widow displayed an acquired knowledge of affairs
and a natural wisdom that inspired her to probe deeply. To my
undoing, she probed too deeply in one matter. It concerned some
land - a little property - at Velez. She had been attached to the
place, it seemed, and she missed all mention of it from the papers
that I brought her. She asked the reason.
“It is disposed of,” I told her.
“Disposed of!” quoth she. “But by whom?”
“By the Prince, your husband, a little while before he died.”
She looked up at me - she was seated at the wide, carved
writing-table, I standing by her side - as if expecting me to say
more. As I left my utterance there, she frowned perplexedly.
“But what mystery is this?” she asked me. “To whom has it gone?”
“To one Sancho Gordo.”
“To Sancho Gordo?” The frown deepened. “The washerwoman’s son?
You will not tell me that he bought it?”
“I do not tell you so, madame. It was a gift from the Prince, your
husband.”
“A gift!” She laughed. “To Sancho Gordo! So the washerwoman’s
child is Eboli’s son!”
And again she laughed on a note of deep contempt.
“Madame!” I cried, appalled and full of pity, “I assure you that
you assume too much. The Prince - “
“Let be,” she interrupted me. “Do you dream I care what rivals I
may have had, however lowly they may have been? The Prince, my
husband, is dead, and that is very well. He is much better dead,
Don Antonio. The pity of it is that he ever lived, or else that I
was born a woman.”
She was staring straight before her, her hands fallen to her lap,
her face set as if carved and lifeless, and her voice came hard as
the sound of one stone beating upon another.
“Do you dream what it can mean to have been so nurtured on
indignities that there is no anger left, no pride to wound by the
discovery of yet another nothing but cold, cold hate? That, Don
Antonio, is my case. You do not know what my life has been. That
man - “
“He is dead, madame,” I reminded her, out of pity.
“And damned, I hope,” she answered me in that same cold, emotionless
voice. “He deserves no less for all the wrongs he did to me, the
least of which was the great wrong of marrying me. For advancement
he acquired me; for his advancement he bartered and used me and made
of me a thing of shame.”
I was so overwhelmed with grief and love and pity that a groan
escaped me almost before I was aware of it. She broke off short,
and stared at me in haughtiness.
“You presume to pity me, I think,” she reproved me. “It is my own
fault. I was wrong to talk. Women should suffer silently, that
they may preserve at least a mask of dignity. Otherwise they incur
pity - and pity is very near contempt.”
And then I lost my head.
“Not mine, not mine!” I cried, throwing out my arms; and though
that was all I said, there was such a ring in my choking voice that
she rose stiffly from her seat and stood tense and tall confronting
me, almost eye to eye, reproof in every line of her.
“Princess, forgive me!” I cried. “It breaks my heart in pieces to
hear you utter things that have been in my mind these many years,
poisoning the devotion that I owed to the late Prince, poisoning
the very loyalty I owe my King. You say I pity you. If that were
so, none has the better right.”
“Who gave it you?” she asked me, breathless.
“Heaven itself, I think,” I answered recklessly. “What you have
suffered, I have suffered for you. When I came to Court the infamy
was a thing accomplished - all of it. But I gathered it, and
gathering it, thanked Heaven I had been spared the pain and misery
of witnessing it, which must have been more than ever I could have
endured. Yet when I saw you, when I watched you - your wistful
beauty, your incomparable grace - there was a time when the thought
to murder stirred darkly in my mind that I might at least avenge you.”
She fell away before me, white to the very lips, her eyes dilating
as they regarded me.
“In God’s name, why?” she asked me in a strangled voice.
“Because I loved you,” I replied, “always, always, since the day I
saw you. Unfortunately, that day was years too late, even had I
dared to hope - “
“Antonio!” Something in her voice drew my averted eyes. Her lips
had parted, her eyes kindled into life, a flush was stirring in
her cheeks.
“And I never knew! I never knew!” she faltered piteously.
I stared.
“Dear Heaven, why did you withhold a knowledge that would have
upheld me and enheartened me through all that I have suffered?
Once, long, long agog I hoped - “
“You hoped!”
“I hoped, Antonio - long, long ago.”
We were in each other’s arms, she weeping on my shoulder as if her
heart would burst, I almost mad with mingling joy and pain - and
as God lives there was more matter here for pain than joy.
We sat long together after that, and talked it out. There was no
help for it. It was too late on every count. On her side there
was the King, most jealous of all men, whose chattel she was become;
on mine, there was my wife and children, and so deep and true was
my love for Anne that it awakened in me thoughts of the loyalty I
owed Juana, thoughts that had never troubled me hitherto in my
pleasure-loving life - and this not only as concerned Anne herself,
but as concerned all women. There was something so ennobling and
sanctifying about our love that it changed at once the whole of my
life, the whole tenor of my ways. I abandoned profligacy, and
became so staid and orderly in my conduct that I was scarcely
recognizable for the Antonio Perez whom the world had known hitherto.
We parted there that day with a resolve to put all this behind us;
to efface from our minds all memory of what had passed between us!
Poor fools were we to imagine we could resist the vortex of
circumstance which had caught us. For three months we kept our
engagement scrupulously; and then, at last, resistance mutually
exhausted, we yielded each to the other, both to Fate.
But because we cherished our love we moved with caution. I was
circumspect in my comings and goings, and such were the precautions
we observed, that for four years the world had little suspicion, and
certainly no knowledge, that I had inherited from the Prince of
Eboli more than his office as Secretary of State. This secrecy was
necessary as long as Philip lived, for we were both fully aware of
what manner of vengeance we should have to reckon with did knowledge
of our relations reach the jealous King. And I think
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