The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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to do the rest. I don’t know whether the palace cleaners will come
here to-day as it is All Saints’, or to-morrow, which will be All
Souls’. Should any one come, I shall run for it the moment the
door is opened, and you had best follow me. If no one comes, I
shall not move from here, and if I die of hunger, so much the worse.”
It was a speech that flung the monk into a passion. In burning
terms he reviled Casanova, calling him a madman, a seducer, a
deceiver, a liar. Casanova let him rave. It was just striking six.
Precisely an hour had elapsed since they had left the attic.
Balbi, in his red flannel waistcoat and his puce-coloured leather
breeches, might have passed for a peasant; but Casanova, in torn
garments that were soaked in blood, presented an appearance that
was terrifying and suspicious. This he proceeded to repair.
Tearing a handkerchief, he made shift to bandage his wounds, and
then from his bundle he took his fine taffeta summer suit, which
on a winter’s day must render him ridiculous.
He dressed his thick, dark brown hair as best he could, drew on a
pair of white stockings, and donned three lace shirts one over
another. His fine cloak of floss silk he gave to Balbi, who looked
for all the world as if he had stolen it.
Thus dressed, his fine hat laced with point of Spain on his head,
Casanova opened a window and looked out. At once he was seen by
some idlers in the courtyard, who, amazed at his appearance there,
and conceiving that he must have been locked in by mistake on the
previous day, went off at once to advise the porter. Meanwhile,
Casanova, vexed at having shown himself where he had not expected
any one, and little guessing how excellently this was to serve his
ends, left the window and went to sit beside the angry friar, who
greeted him with fresh revilings.
A sound of steps and a rattle of keys stemmed Balbi’s reproaches
in full flow. The lock groaned.
“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 antechamber, 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 was
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
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