Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer, and David Widger

THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT

First Series

By Rafael Sabatini

PREFACE

In approaching "The Historical Nights' Entertainment" I set myself the
task of reconstructing, in the fullest possible detail and with all the
colour available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous
events. I would select for my purpose those which were in themselves
bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst
relating each of these events in the form of a story, I would compel
that story scrupulously to follow the actual, recorded facts without
owing anything to fiction, and I would draw upon my imagination, if at
all, merely as one might employ colour to fill in the outlines which
history leaves grey, taking care that my colour should be as true to
nature as possible. For dialogue I would depend upon such scraps
of actual speech as were chronicled in each case, amplifying it by
translating into terms of speech the paraphrases of contemporary
chroniclers.

Such was the task I set myself. I am aware that it has been attempted
once or twice already, beginning, perhaps, with the "Crimes Celebres"
of Alexandre Dumas. I am not aware that the attempt has ever succeeded.
This is not to say that I claim success in the essays that follow. How
nearly I may have approached success--judged by the standard I had set
myself--how far I may have fallen short, my readers will discern. I
am conscious, however, of having in the main dutifully resisted the
temptation to take the easier road, to break away from restricting fact
for the sake of achieving a more intriguing narrative. In one instance,
however, I have quite deliberately failed, and in some others I have
permitted myself certain speculations to resolve mysteries of which no
explanation has been discovered. Of these it is necessary that I should
make a full confession.

My deliberate failure is "The Night of Nuptials." I discovered an
allusion to the case of Charles the Bold and Sapphira Danvelt in
Macaulay's "History of England"--quoted from an old number of the
"Spectator"--whilst I was working upon the case of Lady Alice Lisle.
There a similar episode is mentioned as being related of Colonel Kirke,
but discredited because known for a story that has a trick of springing
up to attach itself to unscrupulous captains. I set out to track it to
its source, and having found its first appearance to be in connection
with Charles the Bold's German captain Rhynsault, I attempted to
reconstruct the event as it might have happened, setting it at least in
surroundings of solid fact.

My most flagrant speculation occurs in "The Night of Hate." But in
defence of it I can honestly say that it is at least no more flagrant
than the speculations on this subject that have become enshrined in
history as facts. In other words, I claim for my reconstruction of the
circumstances attending the mysterious death of Giovanni Borgia, Duke of
Gandia, that it no more lacks historical authority than do any other
of the explanatory narratives adopted by history to assign the guilt to
Gandia's brother, Cesare Borgia.

In the "Cambridge Modern History" our most authoritative writers on this
epoch have definitely pronounced that there is no evidence acceptable
to historians to support the view current for four centuries that Cesare
Borgia was the murderer.

Elsewhere I have dealt with this at length. Here let it suffice to say
that it was not until nine months after the deed that the name of Cesare
Borgia was first associated with it; that public opinion had in the mean
time assigned the guilt to a half-dozen others in succession; that no
motive for the crime is discoverable in the case of Cesare; that the
motives advanced will not bear examination, and that they bear on the
face of them the stamp of having been put forward hastily to support
an accusation unscrupulously political in purpose; that the first men
accused by the popular voice were the Cardinal Vice-Chancellor Ascanio
Sforza and his nephew Giovanni Sforza, Tyrant of Pesaro; and, finally,
that in Matarazzo's "Chronicles of Perugia" there is a fairly detailed
account of how the murder was perpetrated by the latter.

Matarazzo, I confess, is worthy of no more credit than any other of the
contemporary reporters of common gossip. But at least he is worthy of no
less. And it is undeniable that in Sforza's case a strong motive for the
murder was not lacking.

My narrative in "The Night of Hate" is admittedly a purely theoretical
account of the crime. But it is closely based upon all the known facts
of incidence and of character; and if there is nothing in the surviving
records that will absolutely support it, neither is there anything that
can absolutely refute it.

In "The Night of Masquerade" I am guilty of quite arbitrarily
discovering a reason to explain the mystery of Baron Bjelke's sudden
change from the devoted friend and servant of Gustavus III of Sweden
into his most bitter enemy. That speculation is quite indefensible,
although affording a possible explanation of that mystery. In the case
of "The Night of Kirk o' Field," on the other hand, I do not think any
apology is necessary for my reconstruction of the precise manner in
which Darnley met his death. The event has long been looked upon as one
of the mysteries of history--the mystery lying in the fact that whilst
the house at Kirk o' Field was destroyed by an explosion, Darnley's body
was found at some distance away, together with that of his page, bearing
every evidence of death by strangulation. The explanation I adopt seems
to me to owe little to speculation.

In the story of Antonio Perez--"The Night of Betrayal"--I have permitted
myself fewer liberties with actual facts than might appear. I have
closely followed his own "Relacion," which, whilst admittedly a piece
of special pleading, must remain the most authoritative document of the
events with which it deals. All that I have done has been to reverse
the values as Perez presents them, throwing the personal elements into
higher relief than the political ones, and laying particular stress upon
the matter of his relations with the Princess of Eboli. "The Night of
Betrayal" is presented in the form of a story within a story. Of the
containing story let me say that whilst to some extent it is fictitious,
it is by no means entirely so. There is enough to justify most of it in
the "Relaciori" itself.

The exceptions mentioned being made, I hope it may be found that I have
adhered rigorously to my purpose of owing nothing to invention in my
attempt to flesh and clothe these few bones of history.

I should add, perhaps, that where authorities differ as to motives,
where there is a conflict of evidence as to the facts themselves, or
where the facts admit of more than one interpretation, I have permitted
myself to be selective, and confined myself to a point of view adopted
at the outset.

R. S.

LONDON, August, 1917

Contents

PREFACE

THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT

I. THE NIGHT OF HOLYROOD--The Murder of David Rizzio II. THE NIGHT OF
KIRK O' FIELD--The Murder of Darnley III. THE NIGHT OF BETRAYAL--Antonio
Perez and Philip II of Spain IV. THE NIGHT OF CHARITY--The Case Of
The Lady Alice Lisle V. THE NIGHT OF MASSACRE--The Story Of The Saint
Bartholomew VI. THE NIGHT OF WITCHCRAFT--Louis XIV and Madame De
Montespan VII. THE NIGHT OF GEMS--The "Affairs" Of The Queen's Necklace
VIII.    THE NIGHT OF TERROR--The Drownings At Nantes Under Carrier
IX. THE NIGHT OF NUPTIALS--Charles The Bold And Sapphira Danvelt X. THE
NIGHT OF STRANGLERS--Govanna Of Naples And Andreas Of Hungary XI.
THE NIGHT OF HATE--The Murder Of The Duke Of Gandia XII. THE NIGHT
OF ESCAPE--Casanova's Escape From The Piombi XIII. THE NIGHT OF
MASQUERADE--The Assassination Of Gustavus III Of Sweden

THE HISTORICAL NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENT

I. THE NIGHT OF HOLYROOD--The Murder of David Rizzio

The tragedy of my Lord Darnley's life lay in the fact that he was a
man born out of his proper station--a clown destined to kingship by the
accident of birth and fortune. By the blood royal flowing in his veins,
he could, failing others, have claimed succession to both the English
and the Scottish thrones, whilst by his marriage with Mary Stuart he
made a definite attempt to possess himself of that of Scotland.

The Queen of Scots, enamoured for a season of the clean-limbed grace and
almost feminine beauty ("ladyfaced," Melville had called him once) of
this "long lad of nineteen" who came a-wooing her, had soon discovered,
in matrimony, his vain, debauched, shiftless, and cowardly nature. She
had married him in July of 1565, and by Michaelmas she had come to know
him for just a lovely husk of a man, empty of heart or brain; and the
knowledge transmuted affection into contempt.

Her natural brother, the Earl of Murray, had opposed the marriage,
chiefly upon the grounds that Darnley was a Catholic, and with Argyll,
Chatellerault, Glencairn, and a host of other Protestant lords, had
risen in arms against his sovereign and her consort. But Mary had chased
her rebel brother and his fellows over the border into England, and by
this very action, taken for the sake of her worthless husband, she sowed
the first seeds of discord between herself and him. It happened that
stout service had been rendered her in this affair by the arrogant
border ruffian, the Earl of Bothwell. Partly to reward him, partly
because of the confidence with which he inspired her, she bestowed
upon him the office of Lieutenant-General of the East, Middle, and West
Marches--an office which Darnley had sought for his father, Lennox.
That was the first and last concerted action of the royal couple.
Estrangement grew thereafter between them, and, in a measure, as it grew
so did Darnley's kingship, hardly established as yet--for the Queen had
still to redeem her pre-nuptial promise to confer upon him the crown
matrimonial--begin to dwindle.

At first it had been "the King and Queen," or "His Majesty and Hers";
but by Christmas--five months after the wedding--Darnley was known
simply as "the Queen's husband," and in all documents the Queen's name
now took precedence of his, whilst coins bearing their two heads, and
the legend "Hen. et Maria," were called in and substituted by a new
coinage relegating him to the second place.

Deeply affronted, and seeking anywhere but in himself and his own
shortcomings the cause of the Queen's now manifest hostility, he
presently conceived that he had found it in the influence exerted upon
her by the Seigneur Davie--that Piedmontese, David Rizzio, who had come
to the Scottish Court some four years ago as a starveling minstrel in
the train of Monsieur de Morette, the ambassador of Savoy.

It was Rizzio's skill upon the rebec that had first attracted Mary's
attention. Later he had become her secretary for French affairs and the
young Queen, reared amid the elegancies of the Court of France, grew
attached to him as to a fellow-exile in the uncouth and turbulent land
over which a harsh destiny ordained that she should rule. Using his
opportunities and his subtle Italian intelligence, he had advanced so
rapidly that soon there was no man in Scotland who stood higher with
the Queen. When Maitland of Lethington was dismissed under suspicion of
favouring the exiled Protestant lords, the Seigneur Davie succeeded him
as her secretary; and now that Morton was under the same suspicion, it
was openly said that the Seigneur Davie would be made chancellor in his
stead.

Thus the Seigneur Davie was become the most powerful man in Scotland,
and it is not to be dreamt that a dour, stiff-necked nobility would
suffer it without demur. They intrigued against him, putting it abroad,
amongst other things, that this foreign upstart was an emissary, of the
Pope's, scheming to overthrow the Protestant religion in Scotland. But
in the duel that followed their blunt Scotch wits were no match for his
Italian subtlety. Intrigue as they might his power remained unshaken.
And then, at last it began to be whispered that he owed his high favour
with the beautiful young Queen to other than his secretarial abilities,
so that Bedford wrote to Cecil:

"What countenance the Queen shows David I will not write, for the honour
due to the person of a queen."

This bruit found credit--indeed, there have been ever since those who
have believed it--and, as it spread, it reached the ears of Darnley.
Because it afforded him an explanation of the Queen's hostility, since
he was without the introspection that would have discovered the true
explanation in his own shortcomings, he flung it as so much fuel upon
the seething fires of his rancour, and became the most implacable of
those who sought the ruin of Rizzio.

He sent for Ruthven, the friend of Murray and the exiled lords--exiled,
remember, on Darnley's own account--and offered to procure the
reinstatement of those outlaws if they would avenge his honour and make
him King of Scots in something more than name.

Ruthven, sick of a mortal illness, having risen from a bed of pain to
come in answer to that summons, listened dourly to the frothing speeches
of that silly, lovely boy.

"No doubt you'll be right about yon fellow Davie," he agreed sombrely,
and purposely he added things that must have outraged Darnley's every
feeling as king and as husband. Then he stated the terms on which
Darnley might count upon his aid.

"Early next month Parliament is to meet over the business of a Bill
of Attainder against Murray and his friends, declaring them by their
rebellion to have forfeited life, land, and goods. Ye can see the power
with her o' this foreign fiddler, that it drives her so to attaint her
own brother. Murray has ever hated Davie, knowing too much of what lies
'twixt the Queen and him to her dishonour, and Master Davie thinks so to
make an end of Murray and his hatred."

Darnley clenched teeth and hands, tortured by the craftily administered
poison.

"What then? What is to do?" he cried,

Ruthven told him bluntly.

"That Bill must never pass. Parliament must never meet to pass it. You
are Her Grace's husband and King of Scots."

"In name!" sneered Darnley bitterly.

"The name will serve," said Ruthven. "In that name ye'll sign me a bond
of formal remission to Murray and his friends for all their actions and
quarrels, permitting their safe return to Scotland, and charging the
lieges to convoy them safely. Do that and leave the rest to us."

If Darnley hesitated at all, it was not because he perceived the irony
of the situation--that he himself, in secret opposition to the Queen,
should sign the pardon of those who had rebelled against her precisely
because she had taken him to husband. He hesitated because indecision
was inherent in his nature.

"And then?" he asked at last.

Ruthven's blood-injected eyes considered him stonily out of a livid,
gleaming face.

"Then, whether you reign with her or without her, reign you shall as
King o' Scots. I pledge myself to that, and I pledge those others, so
that we have the bond."

Darnley sat down to sign the death warrant of the Seigneur Davie.

It was the night of Saturday, the 9th of March.

A fire of pine logs burned fragrantly on the hearth of the small closet
adjoining the Queen's chamber, suffusing it with a sense of comfort,
the greater by contrast with the cheerlessness out of doors, where an
easterly wind swept down from Arthur's Seat and moaned its dismal way
over a snowclad world.

The lovely, golden-headed young queen supped with a little company of
intimates: her natural sister, the Countess of Argyll, the Commendator
of Holyrood, Beaton, the Master of the Household, Arthur Erskine, the
Captain of the Guard, and one other--that, David Rizzio, who from an
errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy,
ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in
his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost
misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early
privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon him that he had
all the appearance of a man of fifty. He was dressed with sombre
magnificence, and a jewel of great price smouldered upon the middle
finger of one of his slender, delicate hands.

Supper was at an end. The Queen lounged on a long seat over against the
tapestried wall. The Countess of Argyll, in a tall chair on the Queen's
left, sat with elbows on the table watching the Seigneur Davie's fine
fingers as they plucked softly at the strings of a long-necked lute. The
talk, which, intimate and untrammelled, had lately been of the child
of which Her Majesty was to be delivered some three months hence, was
flagging now, and it was to fill the gap that Rizzio had taken up the
lute.

His harsh countenance was transfigured as he caressed the strings, his
soul absorbed in the theme of his inspiration. Very softly--indeed, no
more than tentatively as yet--he was beginning one of those wistful airs
in which his spirit survives in Scotland to this day, when suddenly the
expectant hush was broken by a clash of curtain-rings. The tapestries
that masked the door had been swept aside, and on the threshold,
unheralded, stood the tall, stripling figure of the young King.

Darnley's appearance abruptly scattered the Italian's inspiration. The
melody broke off sharply on the single loud note of a string too rudely
plucked.

That and the silence that followed it irked them all, conveying a sense
that here something had been broken which never could be made whole
again.

Darnley shuffled forward. His handsome face was pale save for the two
burning spots upon his cheekbones, and his eyes glittered feveredly. He
had been drinking, so much was clear; and that he should seek the Queen
thus, who so seldom sought her sober, angered those intimates who had
come to share her well-founded dislike of him. King though he might be
in name, into such contempt was he fallen that not one of them rose
in deference, whilst Mary herself watched his approach with hostile,
mistrusting eyes.

"What is it, my lord?" she asked him coldly, as he flung himself down on
the settle beside her.

He leered at her, put an arm about her waist, pulled her to him, and
kissed her oafishly.

None stirred. All eyes were upon them, and all faces blank. After all,
he was the King and she his wife. And then upon the silence, ominous
as the very steps of doom, came a ponderous, clanking tread from the
ante-room beyond. Again the curtains were thrust aside, and the Countess
of Argyll uttered a gasp of sudden fear at the grim spectre she beheld
there. It was a figure armed as for a tourney, in gleaming steel from
head to foot, girt with a sword, the right hand resting upon the hilt of
the heavy dagger in the girdle. The helmet's vizor was raised, revealing
the ghastly face of Ruthven--so ghastly that it must have seemed the
face of a dead man but for the blazing life in the eyes that scanned the
company. Those questing eyes went round the table, settled upon Rizzio,
and seemed horribly to smile.

Startled, disquieted by this apparition, the Queen half rose, Darnley's
hindering arm still flung about her waist.

"What's this?" she cried, her voice sharp.

And then, as if she guessed intuitively what it might portend, she
considered her husband with pale-faced contempt.

"Judas!" she called him, flung away from his detaining arm, and stood
forth to confront that man in steel. "What seek ye here, my lord--and in
this guise?" was her angry challenge.

Ruthven's burning eyes fell away before her glance. He clanked forward a
step or two, flung out a mailed arm, and with a hand that shook pointed
to the Seigneur Davie, who stood blankly watching him.

"I seek yon man," he said gruffly. "Let him come forth."

"He is here by my will," she told him, her anger mounting. "And so are
not you--for which you shall be made to answer."

Then to Darnley, who sat hunched on the settle:

"What does this mean, sir?" she demanded.

"Why--how should I know? Why--why, nothing," he faltered foolishly.

"Pray God that you are right," said she, "for your own sake. And you,"
she continued, addressing Ruthven again and waving a hand in imperious
dismissal, "be you gone, and wait until I send for you, which I promise
you shall be right soon."

If she divined some of the evil of their purpose, if any fear assailed
her, yet she betrayed nothing of it. She was finely tempered steel.

But Ruthven, sullen and menacing, stood his ground.

"Let yon man come forth," he repeated. "He has been here ower lang."

"Over long?" she echoed, betrayed by her quick resentment.

"Aye, ower lang for the good o' Scotland and your husband," was the
brutal answer.

Erskine, of her guards, leapt to his feet.

"Will you begone, sir?" he cried; and after him came Beaton and the
Commendator, both echoing the captain's threatening question.

A smile overspread Ruthven's livid face. The heavy dagger flashed from
his belt.

"My affair is not with any o' ye, but if ye thrust yersels too close
upon my notice--"

The Queen stepped clear of the table to intervene, lest violence should
be done here in her presence. Rizzio, who had risen, stood now beside
her, watching all with a white, startled face. And then, before more
could be said, the curtains were torn away and half a score of men,
whose approach had passed unnoticed, poured into the room. First came
Morton, the Chancellor, who was to be dispossessed of the great seal
in Rizzio's favour. After him followed the brutal Lindsay of the Byres,
Kerr of Faudonside, black-browed Brunston, red-headed Douglas, and a
half-dozen others.

Confusion ensued; the three men of the Queen's household were instantly
surrounded and overpowered. In the brief, sharp struggle the table was
overturned, and all would have been in darkness but that as the table
went over the Countess of Argyll had snatched up the candle-branch, and
stood now holding it aloft to light that extraordinary scene. Rizzio, to
whom the sight of Morton had been as the removal of his last illusion,
flung himself upon his knees before the Queen. Frail and feeble of body,
and never a man of his hands, he was hopelessly unequal to the occasion.

"Justice, madame!" he cried. "Faites justice! Sauvez ma vie!"

Fearlessly, she stepped between him and the advancing horde of
murderers, making of her body a buckler for his protection. White
of face, with heaving bosom and eyes like two glowing sapphires, she
confronted them.

"Back, on your lives!" she bade them.

But they were lost to all sense of reverence, even to all sense of
decency, in their blind rage against this foreign upstart who had
trampled their Scottish vanity in the dust. George Douglas, without
regard for her condition either as queen or woman--and a woman almost
upon the threshold of motherhood--clapped a pistol to her breast and
roughly bade her stand aside.

Undaunted, she looked at him with eyes that froze his trigger-finger,
whilst behind her Rizzio grovelled in his terror, clutching her
petticoat. Thus, until suddenly she was seized about the waist and half
dragged, half-lifted aside by Darnley, who at the same time spurned
Rizzio forward with his foot.

The murderers swooped down upon their prey. Kerr of Faudonside flung
a noose about his body, and drew it tight with a jerk that pulled the
secretary from his knees. Then he and Morton took the rope between
them, and so dragged their victim across the room towards the door.
He struggled blindly as he went, vainly clutching first at an overset
chair, then at a leg of the table, and screeching piteously the while
to the Queen to save him. And Mary, trembling with passion, herself
struggling in the arms of Darnley, flung an angry warning after them.

"If Davie's blood be spilt, it shall be dear blood to some of you!
Remember that, sirs!"

But they were beyond control by now, hounds unleashed upon the quarry of
their hate. Out of her presence Morton and Douglas dragged him, the rest
of the baying pack going after them. They dragged him, screeching still,
across the ante-chamber to the head of the great stairs, and there they
fell on him all together, and so wildly that they wounded one another
in their fury to rend him into pieces. The tattered body, gushing blood
from six-and-fifty wounds, was hurled from top to bottom of the stairs,
with a gold-hilted dagger--Darnley's, in token of his participation in
the deed--still sticking in his breast.

Ruthven stood forward from the group, his reeking poniard clutched in
his right hand, a grin distorting his ghastly, vulturine face. Then he
stalked back alone into the royal presence, dragging his feet a little,
like a man who is weary.

He found the room much as he had left it, save that the Queen had sunk
back to her seat on the settle, and Darnley was now standing over her,
whilst her people were still hemmed about by his own men. Without a "by
your leave," he flung himself into a chair and called hoarsely for a cup
of wine.

Mary's white face frowned at him across the room.

"You shall yet drink the wine that I shall pour you for this night's
work, my lord, and for this insolence! Who gave you leave to sit before
me?"

He waved a hand as if to dismiss the matter. It may have seemed to him
frivolous to dwell upon such a trifle amid so much.

"It's no' frae lack o' respect, Your Grace," he growled, "but frae lack
o' strength. I am ill, and I should ha' been abed but for what was here
to do."

"Ah!" She looked at him with cold repugnance. "What have you done with
Davie?"

He shrugged, yet his eyes quailed before her own.

"He'll be out yonder," he answered, grimly evasive; and he took the wine
one of his followers proffered him.

"Go see," she bade the Countess.

And the Countess, setting the candle-branch upon the buffet, went out,
none attempting to hinder her.

Then, with narrowed eyes, the Queen watched Ruthven while he drank.

"It will be for the sake of Murray and his friends that you do this,"
she said slowly. "Tell me, my lord, what great kindness is there between
Murray and you that, to save him from forfeiture, you run the risk of
being forfeited with him?"

"What I have done," he said, "I have done for others, and under a bond
that shall hold me scatheless."

"Under a bond?" said she, and now she looked up at Darnley, standing
ever at her side. "And was the bond yours, my lord?"

"Me?" He started back. "I know naught of it."

But as he moved she saw something else. She leaned forward, pointing to
the empty sheath at his girdle.

"Where is your dagger, my lord?" she asked him sharply.

"My dagger? Ha! How should I know?"

"But I shall know!" she threatened, as if she were not virtually a
prisoner in the hands of these violent men who had invaded her palace
and dragged Rizzio from her side. "I shall not rest until I know!"

The Countess came in, white to the lips, bearing in her eyes something
of the horror she had beheld.

"What is it?" Mary asked her, her voice suddenly hushed and faltering.

"Madame--he is dead! Murdered!" she announced.

The Queen looked at her, her face of marble. Then her voice came hushed
and tense:

"Are--you sure?"

"Myself I saw his body, madame."

There was a long pause. A low moan escaped the Queen, and her lovely
eyes were filled with tears; slowly these coursed down her cheeks.
Something compelling in her grief hushed every voice, and the craven
husband at her side shivered as her glance fell upon him once more.

"And is it so?" she said at length, considering him. She dried her eyes.
"Then farewell tears; I must study revenge." She rose as if with labour,
and standing, clung a moment to the table's edge. A moment she looked at
Ruthven, who sat glooming there, dagger in one hand and empty wine-cup
in the other; then her glance passed on, and came to rest balefully
on Darnley's face. "You have had your will, my lord," she said, "but
consider well what I now say. Consider and remember. I shall never rest
until I give you as sore a heart as I have presently."

That said she staggered forward. The Countess hastened to her, and
leaning upon her arm, Mary passed through the little door of the closet
into her chamber.

That night the common bell was rung, and Edinburgh roused in alarm.
Bothwell, Huntly, Atholl, and others who were at Holyrood when Rizzio
was murdered, finding it impossible to go to the Queen's assistance, and
fearing to share the secretary's fate--for the palace was a-swarm with
the murderers' men-at-arms--had escaped by one of the windows. The alarm
they spread in Edinburgh brought the provost and townsmen in arms to the
palace by torchlight, demanding to see the Queen, and refusing to depart
until Darnley had shown himself and assured them that all was well
with the Queen and with himself. And what time Darnley gave them this
reassurance from a window of her room, Mary herself stood pale and taut
amid the brutal horde that on this alarm had violated the privacy of her
chamber, while the ruffianly Red Douglas flashed his dagger before her
eyes, swearing that if she made a sound they would cut her into collops.

When at last they withdrew and left her to herself, they left her
no illusions as to her true condition. She was a prisoner in her own
palace. The ante-rooms and courts were thronged with the soldiers of
Morton and Ruthven, the palace itself was hemmed about, and none might
come or go save at the good pleasure of the murderers.

At last Darnley grasped the authority he had coveted. He dictated
forthwith a proclamation which was read next morning at Edinburgh Market
Cross--commanding that the nobles who had assembled in Edinburgh to
compose the Parliament that was to pass the Bill of Attainder should
quit the city within three hours, under pain of treason and forfeiture.

And meanwhile, with poor Rizzio's last cry of "justice!" still ringing
in her ears, Mary sat alone in her chamber, studying revenge as she
had promised. So that life be spared her, justice, she vowed, should
be done--punishment not only for that barbarous deed, but for the very
manner of the doing of it, for all the insult to which she had been
subjected, for the monstrous violence done her feelings and her very
person, for the present detention and peril of which she was full
conscious.

Her anger was the more intense because she never permitted it to diffuse
itself over the several offenders. Ruthven, who had insulted her so
grossly; Douglas, who had offered her personal violence; the Laird
of Faudonside, Morton, and all the others who held her now a helpless
prisoner, she hew for no more than the instruments of Darnley. It was
against Darnley that all her rage was concentrated. She recalled in
those bitter hours all that she had suffered at his vile hands, and
swore that at whatever cost to herself he should yield a full atonement.

He sought her in the morning emboldened by the sovereign power he
was usurping confident that now that he showed himself master of the
situation she would not repine over what was done beyond recall, but
would submit to the inevitable, be reconciled with him, and grant him,
perforce--supported as he now was by the rebellious lords--the crown
matrimonial and the full kingly power he coveted.

But her reception of him broke that confidence into shards.

"You have done me such a Wrong," she told him in a voice of cold hatred,
"that neither the recollection of our early friendship, nor all the hope
you can give me of the future, could ever make me forget it. Jamais!
Jamais je n'oublierai!" she added, and upon that she dismissed him so
imperiously that he went at once.

She sought a way to deal with him, groped blindly for it, being as yet
but half informed of what was taking place; and whilst she groped, the
thing she sought was suddenly thrust into her land. Mary Beaton, one of
the few attendants left her, brought her word later that day that the
Earl of Murray, with Rothes and some other of the exiled lords, was
in the palace. The news brought revelation. It flooded with light
the tragic happening of the night before, showed her how Darnley was
building himself a party in the state. It did more than that. She
recalled the erstwhile mutual hatred and mistrust of Murray and Darnley,
and saw how it might serve her in this emergency.

Instantly she summoned Murray to her presence with the message that
she welcomed his return. Yet, despite that message, he hardly
expected--considering what lay between them--the reception that awaited
him at her hands.

She rose to receive him, her lovely eyes suffused with tears. She
embraced him, kissed him, and then, nestling to him, as if for comfort,
her cheek against his bearded face, she allowed her tears to flow
unchecked.

"I am punished," she sobbed--"oh, I am punished! Had I kept you at home,
Murray, you would never have suffered men to entreat me as I have been
entreated."

Holding her to hin, he could but pat her shoulder, soothing her, utterly
taken aback, and deeply moved, too, by this display of an affection for
him that he had never hitherto suspected in her.

"Ah, mon Dieu, Jamie, how welcome you are to one in my sorrow!" she
continued. "It is the fault of others that you have been so long out of
the country. I but require of you that you be a good subject to me, and
you shall never find me other to you than you deserve."

And he, shaken to the depths of his selfish soul by her tears, her
clinging caresses, and her protestations of affection, answered with
an oath and a sob that no better or more loyal and devoted subject than
himself could all Scotland yield her.

"And, as for this killing of Davie," he ended vehemently, "I swear by my
soul's salvation that I have had no part in it, nor any knowledge of it
until my return!"

"I know--I know!" she moaned. "Should I make you welcome, else? Be my
friend, Jamie; be my friend!"

He swore it readily, for he was very greedy of power, and saw the door
of his return to it opening wider than he could have hoped. Then he
spoke of Darnley, begging her to receive him, and hear what he might
have to say, protesting that the King swore that he had not desired the
murder, and that the lords had carried the matter out of his hands and
much beyond all that he had intended.

Because it suited her deep purpose, Mary consented, feigning to be
persuaded. She had realized that before she could deal with Darnley, and
the rebel lords who held her a prisoner, she must first win free from
Holyrood.

Darnley came. He was sullen now, mindful of his recent treatment, and in
fear--notwithstanding Murray's reassurance--of further similar rebuffs.
She announced herself ready to hear what he might have to say, and she
listened attentively while he spoke, her elbow on the carved arm of her
chair, her chin in her hand. When he had done, she sat long in thought,
gazing out through the window at the grey March sky. At length she
turned and looked at him.

"Do you pretend, my lord, to regret for what has passed?" she challenged
him.

"You tempt me to hypocrisy," he said. "Yet I will be frank as at an
Easter shrift. Since that fellow Davie fell into credit and familiarity
with Your Majesty, you no longer treated me nor entertained me after
your wonted fashion, nor would you ever bear me company save this Davie
were the third. Can I pretend, then, to regret that one who deprived
me of what I prized most highly upon earth should have been removed? I
cannot. Yet I can and do proclaim my innocence of any part or share in
the deed that has removed him."

She lowered her eyes an instant, then raised them again to meet his own.

"You had commerce with these traitor lords," she reminded him. "It is
by your decree that they are returned from exile. What was your aim in
this?"

"To win back the things of which this fellow Davie had robbed me, a
share in the ruling and the crown matrimonial that was my right, yet
which you denied me. That and no more. I had not intended that Davie
should be slain. I had not measured the depth of their hatred of that
upstart knave. You see that I am frank with you."

"Aye, and I believe you," she lied slowly, considering him as she spoke.
And he drew a breath of relief, suspecting nothing of her deep guile.
"And do you know why I believe you? Because you are a fool."

"Madame!" he cried.

She rose, magnificently contemptuous.

"Must I prove it? You say that the crown matrimonial which I denied
you is to be conferred on you by these lawless men? Believing that, you
signed their pardon and recall from exile. Ha! You do not see, my lord,
that you are no more than their tool, their cat's-paw. You do not see
that they use you but for their ends, and that when they have done with
you, they will serve you as they served poor Davie? No, you see none of
that, which is why I call you a fool, that need a woman's wit to open
wide your eyes."

She was so vehement that she forced upon his dull wits some of
the convictions she pretended were her own. Yet, resisting those
convictions, he cried out that she was at fault.

"At fault?" She laughed. "Let my memory inform your judgment. When these
lords, with Murray at their head, protested against our marriage, in
what terms did they frame their protest? They complained that I had set
over them without consulting them one who had no title to it, whether
by lineal descent of blood, by nature, or by consent of the Estates.
Consider that! They added, remember--I repeat to you the very words
they wrote and published--that while they deemed it their duty to endure
under me, they deemed it intolerable to suffer under you."

She was flushed, and her eyes gleamed with excitement. She clutched
his sleeve, and brought her face close to his own, looked deep and
compellingly into his eyes as she continued:

"Such was their proclamation, and they took arms against me to enforce
it, to pull you down from the place to which I had raised you out of the
dust. Yet you can forget it, and in your purblind folly turn to these
very men to right the wrongs you fancy I have done you. Do you think
that men, holding you in such esteem as that, can keep any sort of faith
with you? Do you think these are the men who are likely to fortify
and maintain your title to the crown? Ask yourself, and answer for
yourself."

He was white to the lips. As much by her vehement pretence of sincerity
as by the apparently irrefragable logic of her arguments, she forced
conviction upon him. This brought a loathly fear in its train, and the
gates of his heart stood ever wide to fear. He stepped aside to a chair,
and sank into it, looking at her with dilating eyes--a fool confronted
with the likely fruits of his folly.

"Then--then--why did they proffer me their help? How can they achieve
their ends this way?"

"How? Do you still ask? Do you not see what a blind tool you have been
in their crafty hands? In name at least you are king, and your signature
is binding upon my subjects. Have you not brought them back from exile
by one royal decree, whilst by another you have dispersed the Parliament
that was assembled to attaint them of treason?"

She stepped close up to him, and bending over him as he sat there,
crushed by realization, she lowered her voice.

"Pray God, my lord, that all their purpose with you is not yet complete,
else in their hands I do not think your life is to be valued at an
apple-paring. You go the ways poor Davie went."

He sank his handsome head to his hands, and covered his face. A while
he sat huddled there, she watching him with gleaming, crafty eyes. At
length he rallied. He looked up, tossing back the auburn hair from his
white brow, still fighting, though weakly, against persuasion. "It is
not possible," he, cried. "They could not! They could not!"

She laughed, betwixt bitterness and sadness.

"Trust to that," she bade him. "Yet look well at matters as they are
already. I am a prisoner here in these men's hands. They will not let
me go until their full purpose is accomplished--perhaps," she added
wistfully, "perhaps not even then."

"Ah, not that!" he cried out.

"Even that," she answered firmly. "But," and again she grew vehement,
"is it less so with you? Are you less a prisoner than I? D'ye think you
will be suffered to come and go at will?" She saw the increase of fear
in him, and then she struck boldly, setting all upon the gamble of a
guess. "I am kept here until I shall have been brought to such a state
that I will add my signature to your own and so pardon one and all for
what is done."

His sudden start, the sudden quickening of his glance told her how
shrewdly she had struck home. Fearlessly, then, sure of herself, she
continued. "To that end they use you. When you shall have served it you
will but cumber them. When they shall have used you to procure their
security from me, then they will deal with you as they have ever sought
to deal with you--so that you trouble them no more. Ah, at last you
understand!"

He came to his feet, his brow gleaming with sweat, his slender hands
nervously interlocked.

"Oh, God!" he cried in a stifled voice.

"Aye, you are in a trap, my lord. Yourself you've sprung it."

And now you behold him broken by the terror she had so cunningly evoked.
He flung himself upon his knees before her, and with upturned face and
hands that caught and clawed at her own, he implored her pardon for
the wrong that in his folly he had done her in taking sides with her
enemies.

She dissembled under a mask of gentleness the loathing that his
cowardice aroused in her.

"My enemies?" she echoed wistfully. "Say rather your own enemies. It
was their enmity to you that drove them into exile. In your rashness you
have recalled them, whilst at the same time you have so bound my hands
that I cannot now help you if I would."

"You can, Mary," he cried, "or else no one can. Withhold the pardon they
will presently be seeking of you. Refuse to sign any remission of their
deed."

"And leave them to force you to sign it, and so destroy us both," she
answered.

He ranted then, invoking the saints of heaven, and imploring her in
their name--she who was so wise and strong--to discover some way out of
this tangle in which his madness had enmeshed them.

"What way is there short of flight?" she asked him. "And how are we to
fly who are imprisoned here you as well as myself? Alas, Darnley, I fear
our lives will end by paying the price of your folly."

Thus she played upon his terrors, so that he would not be dismissed
until she had promised that she would consider and seek some means of
saving him, enjoining him meanwhile to keep strict watch upon himself
and see that he betrayed nothing of his thoughts.

She left him to the chastening of a sleepless night, then sent for him
betimes on Monday morning, and bade him repair to the lords and tell
them that realizing herself a prisoner in their hands she was disposed
to make terms with them. She would grant them pardon for what was done
if on their side they undertook to be loyal henceforth and allowed her
to resume her liberty.

The message startled him. But the smile with which she followed it was
reassuring.

"There is something else you are to do," she said, "if we are to turn
the tables on these traitorous gentlemen. Listen." And she added matter
that begat fresh hope in Darnley's despairing soul.

He kissed her hands, lowly now and obedient as a hound that had been
whipped to heel, and went below to bear her message to the lords.

Morton and Ruthven heard him out, but betrayed no eagerness to seize the
opportunity.

"All this is but words that we hear," growled Ruthven, who lay stretched
upon a couch, grimly suffering from the disease that was, slowly eating
up his life.

"She is guileful as the serpent," Morton added, "being bred up in the
Court of France. She will make you follow her will and desire, but she
will not so lead us. We hold her fast, and we do not let her go without
some good security of what shall follow."

"What security will satisfy you?" quoth Darnley.

Murray and Lindsay came in as he was speaking, and Morton told them of
the message that Darnley had brought. Murray moved heavily across to a
window-seat, and sat down. He cleared a windowpane with his hand, and
looked out upon the wintry landscape as if the matter had no interest
for him. But Lindsay echoed what the other twain had said already.

"We want a deal more than promises that need not be kept," he said.

Darnley looked from one to the other of them, seeing in their
uncompromising attitude a confirmation of what the Queen had told him,
and noting, too--as at another time he might not have noted--their utter
lack of deference to himself, their King.

"Sirs," he said, "I vow you wrong Her Majesty. I will stake my life upon
her honour."

"Why, so you may," sneered Ruthven, "but you'll not stake ours."

"Take what security you please, and I will subscribe it."

"Aye, but will the Queen?" wondered Morton.

"She will. I have her word for it."

It took them the whole of that day to consider the terms of the articles
that would satisfy them. Towards evening the document was ready,
and Morton and Ruthven representing all, accompanied by Murray, and
introduced by Darnley, came to the chamber to which Her Majesty was
confined by the guard they had set upon her.

She sat as if in state awaiting them, very lovely and very tearful,
knowing that woman's greatest strength is in her weakness, that tears
would serve her best by presenting her as if broken to their will.

In outward submission they knelt before her to make the pretence of
suing for the pardon which they extorted by force of arms and duress.
When each in his turn had made the brief pleading oration he had
prepared, she dried her eyes and controlled herself by obvious effort.

"My lords," she said, in a voice that quivered and broke on every other
word, "when have ye ever found me blood-thirsty, or greedy of your lands
or goods that you must use me so, and take such means with me? Ye have
set my authority at naught, and wrought sedition in this realm. Yet I
forgive you all, that by this clemency I may move you to a better love
and loyalty. I desire that all that is passed may be buried in oblivion,
so that you swear to me that in the future you will stand my friends and
serve me faithfully, who am but a weak woman, and sorely need stout men
to be my friends."

For a moment her utterance was checked by sobs. Then she controlled
herself again by an effort so piteous to behold that even the
flinty-hearted Ruthven was moved to some compassion.

"Forgive this weakness in me, who am very weak, for very soon I am to be
brought to bed as you well know, and I am in no case to offer resistance
to any. I have no more to say, my lords. Since you promise on your side
that you will put all disloyalty behind you, I pledge myself to remit
and pardon all those that were banished for their share in the late
rising, and likewise to pardon those that were concerned in the killing
of Seigneur Davie. All this shall be as if it had never been. I pray
you, my lords, make your own security in what sort you best please, and
I will subscribe it."

Morton proffered her the document they had prepared. She conned it
slowly, what time they watched her, pausing ever and anon to brush aside
the tears that blurred her vision. At last she nodded her lovely golden
head.

"It is very well," she said. "All is here as I would have it be between
us." And she turned to Darnley. "Give me pen and ink, my lord."

Darnley dipped a quill and handed it to her. She set the parchment
on the little pulpit at her side. Then, as she bent to sign, the pen
fluttered from her fingers, and with a deep, shuddering sigh she sank
back in her chair, her eyes closed, her face piteously white.

"The Queen is faint!" cried Murray, springing forward.

But she rallied instantly, smiling upon them wanly.

"It is naught; it is past," she said. But even as she spoke she put a
hand to her brow. "I am something dizzy. My condition--" She faltered on
a trembling note of appeal that increased their compassion, and aroused
in them a shame of their own harshness. "Leave this security with me. I
will subscribe it in the morning--indeed, as soon as I am sufficiently
recovered."

They rose from their knees at her bidding, and Morton in the name of all
professed himself full satisfied, and deplored the affliction they had
caused her, for which in the future they should make her their amends.

"I thank you," she answered simply. "You have leave to go."

They departed well satisfied; and, counting the matter at an end, they
quitted the palace and rode to their various lodgings in Edinburgh town,
Murray going with Morton.

Anon to Maitland of Lethington, who had remained behind, came one of
the Queen's women to summon him to her presence. He found her disposing
herself for bed, and was received by her with tearful upbraidings.

"Sir," she said, "one of the conditions upon which I consented to the
will of their lordships was that an immediate term should be set to the
insulting state of imprisonment in which I am kept here. Yet men-at-arms
still guard the very door of my chamber, and my very attendants are
hindered in their comings and goings. Do you call this keeping faith
with me? Have I not granted all the requests of the lords?"

Lethington, perceiving the justice of what she urged, withdrew shamed
and confused at once to remedy the matter by removing the guards from
the passage and the stairs and elsewhere, leaving none but those who
paced outside the palace.

It was a rashness he was bitterly to repent him on the morrow, when
it was discovered that in the night Mary had not only escaped, but had
taken Darnley with her. Accompanied by him and a few attendants, she had
executed the plan in which earlier that day she had secured her scared
husband's cooperation. At midnight they had made their way along the now
unguarded corridors, and descended to the vaults of the palace, whence a
secret passage communicated with the chapel. Through this and across the
graveyard where lay the newly buried body of the Siegneur Davie--almost
across the very grave itself which stood near the chapel door they had
won to the horses waiting by Darnley's orders in the open. And they had
ridden so hard that by five o'clock of that Tuesday morning they were in
Dunbar.

In vain did the alarmed lords send a message after her to demand her
signature of the security upon which she had duped them into counting
prematurely.

Within a week they were in full flight before the army at the head of
which the prisoner who had slipped through their hands was returning
to destroy them. Too late did they perceive the arts by which she had
fooled them, and seduced the shallow Darnley to betray them.

II. THE NIGHT OF KIRK O' FIELD--The Murder of Darnley

Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes of a lifetime in which mistakes
were plentiful was the hesitancy of the Queen of Scots in executing upon
her husband Darnley the prompt vengeance she had sworn for the murder of
David Rizzio.

When Rizzio was slain, and she herself held captive by the murderers in
her Palace of Holyrood, whilst Darnley ruled as king, she had simulated
belief in her husband's innocence that she might use him for her
vengeful ends.

She had played so craftily upon his cowardly nature as to convince
him that Morton, Ruthven, and the other traitor lords with whom he had
leagued himself were at heart his own implacable enemies; that they
pretended friendship for him to make a tool of him, and that when he had
served their turn they would destroy him.

In his consequent terror he had betrayed his associates, assisting her
to trick them by a promise to sign an act of oblivion for what was
done. Trusting to this the lords had relaxed their vigilance, whereupon,
accompanied by Darnley, she had escaped by night from Holyrood.

Hope tempering at first the rage and chagrin in the hearts of the lords
she had duped, they had sent a messenger to her at Dunbar to request
of her the fulfilment of her promise to sign the document of their
security.

But Mary put off the messenger, and whilst the army she had summoned
was hastily assembling, she used her craft to divide the rebels against
themselves.

To her natural brother, the Earl of Murray, to Argyll, and to all those
who had been exiled for their rebellion at the time of her marriage--and
who knew not where they stood in the present turn of events, since
one of the objects of the murder had been to procure their
reinstatement--she sent an offer of complete pardon, on condition that
they should at once dissociate themselves from those concerned in the
death of the Seigneur Davie.

These terms they accepted thankfully, as well they might. Thereupon,
finding themselves abandoned by all men--even by Darnley in whose
service they had engaged in the murder--Morton, Ruthven, and their
associates scattered and fled.

By the end of that month of March, Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay of the
Byres, George Douglas, and some sixty others were denounced as rebels
with forfeiture of life and goods, while one Thomas Scott, who had been
in command of the guards that had kept Her Majesty prisoner at Holyrood,
was hanged, drawn, and quartered at the Market Cross.

News of this reached the fugitives to increase their desperate rage.
But what drove the iron into the soul of the arch-murderer Ruthven
was Darnley's solemn public declaration denying all knowledge of or
complicity in Rizzio's assassination; nor did it soothe his fury to know
that all Scotland rang with contemptuous laughter at that impudent and
cowardly perjury. From his sick-bed at Newcastle, whereon some six weeks
later he was to breathe his last, the forsaken wretch replied to it by
sending the Queen the bond to which he had demanded Darnley's signature
before embarking upon the business.

It was a damning document. There above the plain signature and seal of
the King was the admission, not merely of complicity, but that the thing
was done by his express will and command, that the responsibility
was his own, and that he would hold the doers scatheless from all
consequences.

Mary could scarcely have hoped to be able to confront her worthless
husband with so complete a proof of his duplicity and baseness. She sent
for him, confounded him with the sight of that appalling bond, made an
end to the amity which for her own ends she had pretended, and drove him
out of her presence with a fury before which he dared not linger.

You see him, then, crushed under his load of mortification, realizing at
last how he had been duped on every hand, first by the lords for their
own purpose, and then by the Queen for hers. Her contempt of him was now
so manifest that it spread to all who served him--for she made it plain
that who showed him friendship earned her deep displeasure--so that
he was forced to withdraw from a Court where his life was become
impossible. For a while he wandered up and down a land where every door
was shut in his face, where every man of whatsoever party, traitor or
true, despised him alike. In the end, he took himself off to his father,
Lennox, and at Glasgow he sought what amusement he could with his dogs
and his hawks, and such odd vulgar rustic love-affairs as came his way.

It was in allowing him thus to go his ways, in leaving her
vengeance--indeed, her justice--but half accomplished, that lay the
greatest of the Queen's mistakes. Better for her had she taken with
Darnley the direct way that was her right. Better for her, if acting
strongly then, she had banished or hanged him for his part in the
treason that had inspired the murder of Rizzio. Unfortunately, a factor
that served to quicken her abhorrence of him served also to set a curb
of caution upon the satisfaction of it.

This factor that came so inopportunely into her life was her regard for
the arrogant, unscrupulous Earl of Bothwell. Her hand was stayed by fear
that men should say that for Bothwell's sake she had rid herself of a
husband become troublesome. That Bothwell had been her friend in the
hour when she had needed friends, and knew not whom she might trust;
that by his masterfulness he seemed a man upon whom a woman might lean
with confidence, may account for the beginnings of the extraordinary
influence he came so swiftly to exercise over her, and the passion he
awakened in her to such a degree that she was unable to dissemble it.

Her regard for him, the more flagrant by contrast with her contempt for
Darnley, is betrayed in the will she made before her confinement in
the following June. Whilst to Darnley she bequeathed nothing but the
red-enamelled diamond ring with which he had married her--"It was with
this that I was married," she wrote almost contemptuously. "I leave it
to the King who gave it me"--she appointed Bothwell to the tutelage of
her child in the event of her not surviving it, and to the government of
the realm.

The King came to visit her during her convalescence, and was scowled
upon by Murray and Argyll, who were at Holyrood, and most of all
by Bothwell, whose arrogance by now was such that he was become the
best-hated man in Scotland. The Queen received him very coldly, whilst
using Bothwell more than cordially in his very presence, so that he
departed again in a deeper humiliation than before.

Then before the end of July there was her sudden visit to Bothwell
at Alloa, which gave rise to so much scandal. Hearing of it, Darnley
followed in a vain attempt to assert his rights as king and husband,
only to be flouted and dismissed with the conviction that his life was
no longer safe in Scotland, and that he had best cross the Border.
Yet, to his undoing, detained perhaps by the overweening pride that
is usually part of a fool's equipment, he did not act upon that wise
resolve. He returned instead to his hawking and his hunting, and was
seldom seen at Court thereafter.

Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death at
Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again without any
assurance that she would recover. But then the facts of her illness, and
how it had been contracted, were not such as to encourage kindness in
him, even had he been inclined to kindness.

Bothwell had taken three wounds in a Border affray some weeks before,
and Mary, hearing of this and that he lay in grievous case at Hermitage,
had ridden thither in her fond solicitude--a distance of thirty
miles--and back again in the same day, thus contracting a chill which
had brought her to the very gates of death.

Darnley had not only heard of this, but he had found Bothwell at
Jedburgh, whither he had been borne in a litter, when in his turn he had
heard of how it was with Mary; and Bothwell had treated him with more
than the contempt which all men now showed him, but which from none
could wound him so deeply as from this man whom rumour accounted Mary's
lover.

Matters between husband and wife were thus come to a pass in which they
could not continue, as all men saw, and as she herself confessed at
Craigmillar, whither she repaired, still weak in body, towards the end
of November.

Over a great fire that blazed in a vast chamber of the castle she sat
sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was swathed in
a long cloak of deepest purple reversed with ermine. Her face was thin
and of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of wistfulness amid
the shadows which her illness had set about them.

"I do wish I could be dead!" she sighed.

Bothwell's eyes narrowed. He was leaning on the back of her tall chair,
a long, virile figure with a hawk-nosed, bearded face that was sternly
handsome. He thrust back the crisp dark hair that clustered about his
brow, and fetched a sigh.

"It was never my own death I wished when a man stood in my road to aught
I craved," he said, lowering his voice, for Maitland of Lethington--now
restored to his secretaryship--was writing at a table across the room,
and my Lord of Argyll was leaning over him.

She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes startled.

"What devil's counsel do you whisper?" she asked him. And when he would
have answered, she raised a hand. "No," she said. "Not that way."

"There is another," said Bothwell coolly. He moved, came round, and
stood squarely upon the hearth, his back to the fire, confronting her,
nor did he further trouble to lower his voice. "We have considered it
already."

"What have you considered?"

Her voice was strained; fear and excitement blended in her face.

"How the shackles that fetter you might be broken. Be not alarmed.
It was the virtuous Murray himself propounded it to Argyll and
Lethington--for the good of Scotland and yourself." A sneer flitted
across his tanned face. "Let them speak for themselves." He raised his
voice and called to them across the room.

They came at once, and the four made an odd group as they stood there in
the firelit gloom of that November day--the lovely young Queen, so frail
and wistful in her high-backed chair; the stalwart, arrogant Bothwell,
magnificent in a doublet of peach-coloured velvet that tapered to a
golden girdle; Argyll, portly and sober in a rich suit of black; and
Maitland of Lethington, lean and crafty of face, in a long furred gown
that flapped about his bony shanks.

It was to Lethington that Bothwell addressed himself.

"Her Grace is in a mood to hear how the Gordian knot of her marriage
might be unravelled," said he, grimly ironic.

Lethington raised his eyebrows, licked his thin lips, and rubbed his
bony hands one in the other.

"Unravelled?" he echoed with wondering stress. "Unravelled? Ha!" His
dark eyes flashed round at them. "Better adopt Alexander's plan, and cut
it. 'Twill be more complete, and--and final."

"No, no!" she cried. "I will not have you shed his blood."

"He himself was none so tender where another was concerned," Bothwell
reminded her--as if the memory of Rizzio were dear to him.

"What he may have done does not weigh upon my conscience," was her
answer.

"He might," put in Argyll, "be convicted of treason for having consented
to Your Grace's retention in ward at Holyrood after Rizzio's murder."

She considered an instant, then shook her head.

"It is too late. It should have been done long since. Now men will say
that it is but a pretext to be rid of him." She looked up at Bothwell,
who remained standing immediately before her, between her and the fire.
"You said that my Lord of Murray had discussed this matter. Was it in
such terms as these?"

Bothwell laughed silently at the thought of the sly Murray rendering
himself a party to anything so direct and desperate. It was Lethington
who answered her.

"My Lord Murray was for a divorce. That would set Your Grace free,
and it might be obtained, he said, by tearing up the Pope's bull of
dispensation that permitted the marriage. Yet, madame, although Lord
Murray would himself go no further, I have no cause to doubt that were
other means concerted, he would be content to look through his fingers."

Her mind, however, did not seem to follow his speech beyond the matter
of the divorce. A faint flush of eagerness stirred in her pale cheeks.

"Ah, yes!" she cried. "I, too, have thought of that--of this divorce.
And God knows I do not want for grounds. And it could be obtained, you
say, by tearing up this papal bull?"

"The marriage could be proclaimed void thereafter," Argyll explained.

She looked past Bothwell into the fire, and took her chin in her hand.

"Yes," she said slowly, musingly, and again, "yes. That were a way. That
is the way." And then suddenly she looked up, and they saw doubt and
dread in her eyes. "But in that case--what of my son?"

"Aye!" said Lethington grimly. He shrugged his narrow shoulders, parted
his hands, and brought them together again. "That's the obstacle, as we
perceived. It would imperil his succession."

"It would make a bastard of him, you mean?" she cried, demanding the
full expansion of their thoughts.

"Indeed it would do no less," the secretary assented.

"So that," said Bothwell, softly, "we come back to Alexander's method.
What the fingers may not unravel, the knife can sever."

She shivered, and drew her furred cloak the more closely about her.

Lethington leaned forward. He spoke in kindly, soothing accents.

"Let us guide this matter among us, madame," he murmured, "and we'll
find means to rid Your Grace of this young fool, without hurt to your
honour or prejudice to your son. And the Earl of Murray will look the
other way, provided you pardon Morton and his friends for the killing
they did in Darnley's service."

She looked from one to the other of them, scanning each face in turn.
Then her eyes returned to a contemplation of the flaming logs, and she
spoke very softly.

"Do nothing by which a spot might be laid on my honour or conscience,"
she said, with an odd deliberateness that seemed to insist upon the
strictly literal meaning of her words. "Rather I pray you let the matter
rest until God remedy it."

Lethington looked at the other two, the other two looked at him. He
rubbed his hands softly.

"Trust to us, madame," he answered. "We will so guide the matter
that Your Grace shall see nothing but what is good and approved by
Parliament."

She committed herself to no reply, and so they were content to take
their answer from her silence. They went in quest of Huntly and
Sir James Balfour, and the five of them entered into a bond for the
destruction of him whom they named "the young fool and proud tiranne,"
to be engaged in when Mary should have pardoned Morton and his
fellow-conspirators.

It was not until Christmas Eve that she signed this pardon of some
seventy fugitives, proscribed for their participation in the Rizzio
murder, towards whom she had hitherto shown herself so implacable.

The world saw in this no more than a deed of clemency and charity
befitting the solemn festival of good-will. But the five who had entered
into that bond at Craigmillar Castle beheld in it more accurately the
fulfilment of her part of the suggested bargain, the price she paid in
advance to be rid of Darnley, the sign of her full agreement that the
knot which might not be unravelled should be cut.

On that same day Her Grace went with Bothwell to Lord Drummond's, where
they abode for the best part of a week, and thence they went on
together to Tullibardine, the rash and open intimacy between them giving
nourishment to scandal.

At the same time Darnley quitted Stirling, where he had lately been
living in miserable conditions, ignored by the nobles, and even stinted
in his necessary expenses, deprived of his ordinary servants, and his
silver replaced by pewter. The miserable youth reached Glasgow deadly
sick. He had been taken ill on the way, and the inevitable rumour was
spread that he had been poisoned. Later, when it became known that his
once lovely countenance was now blotched and disfigured, it was realized
that his illness was no more than the inevitable result of the debauched
life he led.

Conceiving himself on the point of death, Darnley wrote piteously to the
Queen; but she ignored his letters until she learnt that his condition
was improving, when at last (on January 29th) she went to visit him at
Glasgow. It may well be that she nourished some hope that nature would
resolve the matter for her, and remove the need for such desperate
measures as had been concerted. But seeing him likely to recover, two
things became necessary, to bring him to the place that was suitable for
the fulfilment of her designs, and to simulate reconciliation with him,
and even renewed and tender affection, so that none might hereafter
charge her with complicity in what should follow.

I hope that in this I do her memory no injustice. It is thus that I read
the sequel, nor can I read it in any other way.

She found him abed, with a piece of taffeta over his face to hide its
disfigurement, and she was so moved--as it seemed--by his condition,
that she fell on her knees beside him, and wept in the presence of her
attendants and his own; confessing penitence if anything she had done
in the past could have contributed to their estrangement. Thus
reconciliation followed, and she used him tenderly, grew solicitous
concerning him, and vowed that as soon as he could be moved, he must be
taken to surroundings more salubrious and more befitting the dignity of
his station.

Gladly then he agreed to return with her to Holyrood.

"Not to Holyrood," she said. "At least, not until your health is mended,
lest you should carry thither infection dangerous to your little son."

"Whither then?" he asked her, and when she mentioned Craigmillar, he
started up in bed, so that the taffeta slipped from his face, and it was
with difficulty that she dissembled the loathing with which the sight of
its pustules inspired her.

"Craigmillar!" he cried. "Then what I was told is true."

"What were you told?" quoth she, staring at him, brows knit, her face
blank.

A rumour had filtered through to him of the Craigmillar bond. He had
been told that a letter drawn up there had been presented to her for her
signature, which she had refused. Thus much he told her, adding that he
could not believe that she would do him any hurt; and yet why did she
desire to bear him to Craigmillar?

"You have been told lies," she answered him. "I saw no such letter; I
subscribed none, nor was ever asked to subscribe any," which indeed was
literally true. "To this I swear. As for your going to Craigmillar, you
shall go whithersoever you please, yourself."

He sank back on his pillows, and his trembling subsided.

"I believe thee, Mary. I believe thou'ld never do me any harm," he
repeated, "and if any other would," he added on a bombastic note, "they
shall buy it dear, unless they take me sleeping. But I'll never to
Craigmillar."

"I have said you shall go where you please," she assured him again.

He considered.

"There is the house at Kirk o' Field. It has a fine garden, and is in a
position that is deemed the healthiest about Edinburgh. I need good air;
good air and baths have been prescribed me to cleanse me of this plague.
Kirk o' Field will serve, if it be your pleasure."

She gave a ready consent, dispatched messengers ahead to prepare the
house, and to take from Holyrood certain furnishings that should improve
the interior, and render it as fitting as possible a dwelling for a
king.

Some days later they set out, his misgivings quieted by the tenderness
which she now showed him--particularly when witnesses were at hand.

It was a tenderness that grew steadily during those twelve days in which
he lay in convalescence in the house at Kirk o' Field; she was playful
and coquettish with him as a maid with her lover, so that nothing was
talked of but the completeness of this reconciliation, and the hope that
it would lead to a peace within the realm that would be a benefit to
all. Yet many there were who marvelled at it, wondering whether the
waywardness and caprice of woman could account for so sudden a change
from hatred to affection.

Darnley was lodged on the upper floor, in a room comfortably furnished
from the palace. It was hung with six pieces of tapestry, and the floor
was partly covered by an Eastern carpet. It contained, besides the
handsome bed--which once had belonged to the Queen's mother--a couple of
high chairs in purple velvet, a little table with a green velvet cover,
and some cushions in red. By the side of the bed stood the specially
prepared bath that was part of the cure which Darnley was undergoing. It
had for its incongruous lid a door that had been lifted from its hinges.

Immediately underneath was a room that had been prepared for the Queen,
with a little bed of yellow and green damask, and a furred coverlet. The
windows looked out upon the close, and the door opened upon the passage
leading to the garden.

Here the Queen slept on several of those nights of early February, for
indeed she was more often at Kirk o' Field than at Holy-rood, and when
she was not bearing Darnley company in his chamber, and beguiling the
tedium of his illness, she was to be seen walking in the garden with
Lady Reres, and from his bed he could hear her sometimes singing as she
sauntered there.

Never since the ephemeral season of their courtship had she been on such
fond terms with him, and all his fears of hostile designs entertained
against him by her immediate followers were stilled at last. Yet not
for long. Into his fool's paradise came Lord Robert of Holyrood, with a
warning that flung him into a sweat of panic.

The conspirators had hired a few trusted assistants to help them carry
out their plans, and a rumour had got abroad--in the unaccountable way
of rumours--that there was danger to the King. It was of this rumour
that Lord Robert brought him word, telling him bluntly that unless he
escaped quickly from this place, he would leave his life there. Yet when
Darnley had repeated this to the Queen, and the Queen indignantly had
sent for Lord Robert and demanded to know his meaning, his lordship
denied that he had uttered any such warning, protested that his words
must have been misunderstood--that they referred solely to the King's
condition, which demanded, he thought, different treatment and healthier
air.

Knowing not what to believe, Darnley's uneasiness abode with him. Yet,
trusting Mary, and feeling secure so long as she was by his side, he
became more and more insistent upon her presence, more and more fretful
in her absence. It was to quiet him that she consented to sleep as often
as might be at Kirk o' Field. She slept there on the Wednesday of that
week, and again on Friday, and she was to have done so yet again on that
fateful Sunday, February 9th, but that her servant Sebastien--one
who had accompanied her from France, and for whom she had a deep
affection--was that day married, and Her Majesty had promised to be
present at the masque that night at Holyrood, in honour of his nuptials.

Nevertheless, she did not utterly neglect her husband on that account.
She rode to Kirk o' Field early in the evening, accompanied by Bothwell,
Huntly, Argyll, and some others; and leaving the lords at cards below
to while away the time, she repaired to Darnley, and sat beside his bed,
soothing a spirit oddly perturbed, as if with some premonition of what
was brewing.

"Ye'll not leave me the night," he begged her once.

"Alas," she said, "I must! Sebastien is being wed, and I have promised
to be present."

He sighed and shifted uneasily.

"Soon I shall be well, and then these foolish humours will cease to
haunt me. But just now I cannot bear you from my sight. When you are
with me I am at peace. I know that all is well. But when you go I am
filled with fears, lying helpless here."

"What should you fear?" she asked him.

"The hate that I know is alive against me."

"You are casting shadows to affright yourself," said she.

"What's that?" he cried, half raising himself in sudden alarm. "Listen!"

From the room below came faintly a sound of footsteps, accompanied by a
noise as of something being trundled.

"It will be my servants in my room--putting it to rights."

"To what purpose since you do not sleep there tonight?" he asked. He
raised his voice and called his page.

"Why, what will you do?" she asked him, steadying her own alarm.

He answered her by bidding the youth who had entered go see what was
doing in the room below. The lad departed, and had he done his errand
faithfully, he would have found Bothwell's followers, Hay and
Hepburn, and the Queen's man, Nicholas Hubert better known as French
Paris--emptying a keg of gunpowder on the floor immediately under the
King's bed. But it happened that in the passage he came suddenly face
to face with the splendid figure of Bothwell, cloaked and hatted, and
Bothwell asked him whither he went.

The boy told him.

"It is nothing," Bothwell said. "They are moving Her Grace's bed in
accordance with her wishes."

And the lad, overborne by that commanding figure which so effectively
blocked his path, chose the line of lesser resistance. He went back to
bear the King that message as if for himself he had seen what my Lord
Bothwell had but told him.

Darnley was pacified by the assurance, and the lad withdrew.

"Did I not tell you how it was?" quoth Mary. "Is not my word enough?"

"Forgive the doubt," Darnley begged her. "Indeed, there was no doubt of
you, who have shown me so much charity in my affliction." He sighed, and
looked at her with melancholy eyes.

"I would the past had been other than it has been between you and me,"
he said. "I was too young for kingship, I think. In my green youth I
listened to false counsellors, and was quick to jealousy and the follies
it begets. Then, when you cast me out and I wandered friendless, a devil
took possession of me. Yet, if you will but consent to bury all the
past into oblivion, I will make amends, and you shall find me worthier
hereafter."

She rose, white to the lips, her bosom heaving under her long cloak.
She turned aside and stepped to the window. She stood there, peering out
into the gloom of the close, her knees trembling under her.

"Why do you not answer me?" he cried.

"What answer do you need?" she said, and her voice shook. "Are you not
answered already?" And then, breathlessly, she added: "It is time to go,
I think."

They heard a heavy step upon the stairs and the clank of a sword against
the rails. The door opened, and Bothwell, wrapped in his scarlet cloak,
stood bending his tall shoulders under the low lintel. His gleaming
eyes, so oddly mocking in their glance, for all that his face was set,
fell upon Darnley, and with their look flung him into an inward state of
blending fear and rage.

"Your Grace," said Bothwell's deep voice, "it is close upon midnight."

He came no more than in time; it needed the sight of him with its
reminder of all that he meant to her to sustain a purpose that was being
sapped by pity.

"Very well," she said. "I come."

Bothwell stood aside to give her egress and to invite it. But the King
delayed her.

"A moment--a word!" he begged, and to Bothwell: "Give us leave apart,
sir!"

Yet, King though he might be, there was no ready obedience from the
arrogant Border lord, her lover. It was to Mary that Bothwell looked for
commands, nor stirred until she signed to him to go. And even then he
went no farther than the other side of the door, so that he might be
close at hand to fortify her should any weakness assail her now in this
supreme hour.

Darnley struggled up in bed, caught her hand, and pulled her to him.

"Do not leave me, Mary. Do not leave me!" he implored her.

"Why, what is this?" she cried, but her voice lacked steadiness. "Would
you have me disappoint poor Sebastien, who loves me?"

"I see. Sebastien is more to you than I?"

"Now this is folly. Sebastien is my faithful servant."

"And am I less? Do you not believe that my one aim henceforth will be to
serve you and faithfully? Oh, forgive this weakness. I am full of evil
foreboding to-night. Go, then, if go you must, but give me at least some
assurance of your love, some pledge of it in earnest that you will come
again to-morrow nor part from me again."

She looked into the white, piteous young face that had once been so
lovely, and her soul faltered. It needed the knowledge that Bothwell
waited just beyond the door, that he could overhear what was being said,
to strengthen her fearfully in her tragic purpose.

She has been censured most for what next she did. Murray himself spoke
of it afterwards as the worst part of the business. But it is possible
that she was concerned only at the moment to put an end to a scene that
was unnerving her, and that she took the readiest means to it.

She drew a ring from her finger and slipped it on to one of his.

"Be this the pledge, then," she said; "and so content and rest
yourself."

With that she broke from him, white and scared, and reached the door.
Yet with her hand upon the latch she paused. Looking at him she saw that
he was smiling, and perhaps horror of her betrayal of him overwhelmed
her. It must be that she then desired to warn him, yet with Bothwell
within earshot she realized that any warning must precipitate the
tragedy, with direst consequences to Bothwell and herself.

To conquer her weakness, she thought of David Rizzio, whom Darnley had
murdered almost at her feet, and whom this night was to avenge. She
thought of the Judas part that he had played in that affair, and sought
persuasion that it was fitting he should now be paid in kind. Yet,
very woman that she was, failing to find any such persuasion, she found
instead in the very thought of Rizzio the very means to convey her
warning.

Standing tense and white by the door, regarding him with dilating eyes,
she spoke her last words to him.

"It would be just about this time last year that Davie was slain," she
said, and on that passed out to the waiting Bothwell.

Once on the stairs she paused and set a hand upon the shoulder of the
stalwart Borderer.

"Must it be? Oh, must it be?" she whispered fearfully.

She caught the flash of his eyes in the half gloom as he leaned over
her, his arm about her waist drawing her to him.

"Is it not just? Is it not full merited?" he asked her.

"And yet I would that we did not profit by it," she complained.

"Shall we pity him on that account?" he asked, and laughed softly and
shortly. "Come away," he added abruptly. "They wait for you!" And so,
by the suasion of his arm and his imperious will, she was swept onward
along the road of her destiny.

Outside the horses were ready. There was a little group of gentlemen to
escort her, and half a dozen servants with lighted torches, whilst Lady
Reres was in waiting. A man stood forward to assist her to mount, his
face and hands so blackened by gunpowder that for a moment she failed to
recognize him. She laughed nervously when he named himself.

"Lord, Paris, how begrimed you are!" she cried; and, mounting, rode away
towards Holyrood with her torchbearers and attendants.

In the room above, Darnley lay considering her last words. He turned
them over in his thoughts, assured by the tone she had used and how she
had looked that they contained some message.

"It would be just about this time last year that Davie was slain."

In themselves, those words were not strictly accurate. It wanted yet a
month to the anniversary of Rizzio's death. And why, at parting, should
she have reminded him of that which she had agreed should be forgotten?
Instantly came the answer that she sought to warn him that retribution
was impending. He thought again of the rumours that he had heard of a
bond signed at Craigmillar; he recalled Lord Robert's warning to him,
afterwards denied.

He recalled her words to himself at the time of Rizzio's death:
"Consider well what I now say. Consider and remember. I shall never rest
until I give you as sore a heart as I have presently." And further,
he remembered her cry at once agonized and fiercely vengeful: "Jamais,
jamais je n'oublierai."

His terrors mounted swiftly, to be quieted again at last when he
looked at the ring she had put upon his finger in pledge of her renewed
affection. The past was dead and buried, surely. Though danger might
threaten, she would guard him against it, setting her love about him
like a panoply of steel. When she came to-morrow, he would question her
closely, and she should be more frank and open with him, and tell him
all. Meanwhile, he would take his precautions for to-night.

He sent his page to make fast all doors. The youth went and did as he
was bidden, with the exception of the door that led to the garden. It
had no bolts, and the key was missing; yet, seeing his master's nervous,
excited state, he forbore from any mention of that circumstance when
presently he returned to him.

Darnley requested a book of Psalms, that he might read himself to sleep.
The page dozed in a chair, and so the hours passed; and at last the King
himself fell into a light slumber. Out of this he started suddenly at
a little before two o'clock, and sat upright in bed, alarmed without
knowing why, listening with straining ears and throbbing pulses.

He caught a repetition of the sound that had aroused him, a sound akin
to that which had drawn his attention earlier, when Mary had been with
him. It came up faintly from the room immediately beneath: her room.
Some one was moving there, he thought. Then, as he continued to listen,
all became quiet again, save his fears, which would not be quieted.
He extinguished the light, slipped from the bed, and, crossing to the
window, peered out into the close that was faintly illumined by a
moon in its first quarter. A shadow moved, he thought. He watched with
increasing panic for confirmation, and presently saw that he had been
right. Not one, but several shadows were shifting there among the
trees. Shadows of men, they were, and as he peered, he saw one that
went running from the house across the lawn and joined the others, now
clustered together in a group. What could be their purpose here? In the
silence, he seemed to hear again the echo of Mary's last words to him:

"It would be just about this time last year that Davie was slain."

In terror, he groped his way to the chair where the page slept and shook
the lad vigorously.

"Afoot, boy!" he said, in a hoarse whisper. He had meant to shout it,
but his voice failed him, his windpipe clutched by panic. "Afoot--we are
beset by enemies!"

At once the youth was wide awake, and together the King just in his
shirt as he was--they made their way from the room in the dark, groping
their way, and so reached the windows at the back. Darnley opened one of
these very softly, then sent the boy back for a sheet. Making this
fast, they descended by it to the garden, and started towards the wall,
intending to climb it, that they might reach the open.

The boy led the way, and the King followed, his teeth chattering as much
from the cold as from the terror that possessed him. And then, quite
suddenly, without the least warning, the ground, it 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. To-morrow 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 not at all improved matters by a certain
habit of gaming contracted in youth. The chateau bore abundant signs of
it. It was a burnt red pile standing four-square on a little eminence,
about the base of which the river went winding turbulently; it was
turreted at each of its four angles, imposing in its way, but in a sad
state of dilapidation and disrepair.

The interior, when Don Antonio reached it, was rather better; the
furnishings, though sparse, were massive and imposing; the tapestries on
the walls, if old, were rich and choice. But everywhere the ill-assorted
marriage of pretentiousness and neediness was apparent. The floors of
hall and living-room were strewn with fresh-cut rushes, an obsolescent
custom which served here alike to save the heavy cost of carpets and to
lend the place an ancient baronial dignity. Whilst pretence was made of
keeping state, the servitors were all old, and insufficient in number
to warrant the retention of the infirm seneschal by whom Don Antonio was
ceremoniously received. A single groom, aged and without livery, took
charge at once of Don Antonio's mule, his servant's horse, and the
servant himself.

The seneschal, hobbling before him, conducted our Spaniard across the
great hall, gloomy and half denuded, through the main living-room of the
chateau into a smaller, more intimate apartment, holding some trace of
luxury, which he announced as madame's own room. And there he left him
to await the coming of the chatelaine.

She, at least, showed none of the outward disrepair of her surroundings.
She came to him sheathed in a gown of shimmering silk that was of the
golden brown of autumn tints, caught to her waist by a slender girdle of
hammered gold. Eyes of deepest blue pondered him questioningly, whilst
red lips smiled their welcome. "So you have come in spite of all?" she
greeted him. "Be very welcome to my poor house, Don Antonio."

And regally she proffered her hand to his homage.

He took it, observing the shapely, pointed fingers, the delicately
curving nails. Reluctantly, almost, he admitted to himself how complete
was her beauty, how absolute her charm. He sighed--a sigh for that lost
youth of his, perhaps--as he bowed from his fine, lean height to press
cold lips of formal duty on that hand.

"Your will, madame, was stronger than my prudence," said he.

"Prudence?" quoth she, and almost sneered. "Since when has Antonio Perez
stooped to prudence?"

"Since paying the bitter price of imprudence. You know my story?"

"A little. I know, for instance, that you murdered Escovedo--all the
world knows that. Is that the imprudence of which you speak? I have
heard it said that it was for love of a woman that you did it."

"You have heard that, too?" he said. He had paled a little. "You have
heard a deal, Marquise. I wonder would it amuse you to hear more, to
hear from my own lips this story of mine which all Europe garbles? Would
it?"

There was a faint note of anxiety in his voice, a look faintly anxious
in his eyes.

She scanned him a moment gravely, almost inscrutably. "What purpose
can it serve?" she asked; and her tone was forbidding--almost a tone of
fear.

"It will explain," he insisted.

"Explain what?"

"How it comes that I am not this moment prostrate at your feet; how it
happens that I am not on my knees to worship your heavenly beauty; how I
have contrived to remain insensible before a loveliness that in happier
times would have made me mad."

"Vive Dieu!" she murmured, half ironical. "Perhaps that needs
explaining."

"How it became necessary," he pursued, never heeding the interruption,
"that yesterday you should proclaim your disbelief that I could be, as
you said, a Spaniard of Spain. How it happens that Antonio Perez has
become incapable of any emotion but hate. Will you hear the story--all
of it?"

He was leaning towards her, his white face held close to her own, a
smouldering fire in the dark, sunken eyes that now devoured her.

She shivered, and her own cheeks turned very pale. Her lips were faintly
twisted as if in an effort to smile.

"My friend--if you insist," she consented.

"It is the purpose for which I came," he announced.

For a long moment each looked into the other's eyes with a singular
intentness that nothing here would seem to warrant.

At length she spoke.

"Come," she said, "you shall tell me."

And she waved him to a chair set in the embrasure of the mullioned
window that looked out over a tract of meadowland sweeping gently down
to the river.

Don Antonio sank into the chair, placing his hat and whip upon the floor
beside him. The Marquise faced him, occupying the padded window-seat,
her back to the light, her countenance in shadow.

And here, in his own words, follows the story that he told her as she
herself set it down soon after. Whilst more elaborate and intimate
in parts, it yet so closely agrees throughout with his own famous
"Relacion," that I do not hesitate to accept the assurance she has
left us that every word he uttered was burnt as if by an acid upon her
memory.

THE STORY OF ANTONIO PEREZ

As a love-story this is, I think, the saddest that ever was invented by
a romancer intent upon wringing tears from sympathetic hearts. How sad
it is you will realize when I tell you that daily I thank God on my
knees--for I still believe in God, despite what was alleged against me
by the inquisitors of Aragon--that she who inspired this love of which
I am to tell you is now in the peace of death. She died in exile at
Pastrana a year ago. Anne de Mendoza was what you call in France a great
parti. She came of one of the most illustrious families in Spain, and
she was a great heiress. So much all the world knew. What the world
forgot was that she was a woman, with a woman's heart and mind, a
woman's natural instincts to select her mate. There are fools who envy
the noble and the wealthy. They are little to be envied, those poor
pawns in the game of statecraft, moved hither and thither at the will
of players who are themselves no better. The human nature of them is a
negligible appendage to the names and rent-rolls that predetermine their
place upon the board of worldly ambition, a board befouled by blood, by
slobberings from the evil mouth of greed, and by infamy of every kind.

So, because Anne was a daughter of the House of Mendoza, because her
endowments were great, they plucked her from her convent at the age of
thirteen years, knowing little more of life than the merest babe, and
they flung her into the arms of Ruy Gomez, Prince of Eboli, who was
old enough to have been her father. But Eboli was a great man in Spain,
perhaps the greatest; he was, first Minister to Philip II, and between
his House and that of Mendoza an alliance was desired. To establish it
that tender child was sacrificed without ruth. She discovered that life
held nothing of all that her maiden dreamings had foreseen; that it was
a thing of horror and greed and lovelessness and worse. For there was
much worse to come.

Eboli brought his child-princess to Court. He wore her lightly as
a ribbon or a glove, the insignificant appendage to the wealth and
powerful alliance he had acquired with her. And at Court she came
under the eye of that pious satyr Philip. The Catholic King is very
devout--perfervidly devout. He prays, he fasts, he approaches the
sacraments, he does penance, all in proper season as prescribed by
Mother Church; he abominates sin and lack of faith--particularly in
others; he has drenched Flanders in blood that he might wash it clean
of the heresy of thinking differently from himself in spiritual matters,
and he would have done the same by England but that God--Who cannot,
after all, be quite of Philip's way of thinking--willed otherwise. All
this he has done for the greater honour and glory of his Maker, but he
will not tolerate his Maker's interference with his own minor pleasures
of the flesh. He is, as you would say, a Spaniard of Spain.

This satyr's protruding eyes fell upon the lovely Princess of Eboli--for
lovely she was, a very pearl among women. I spare you details. Eboli was
most loyal and submissive where his King was concerned, most complacent
and accommodating. That was but logical, and need not shock you at all.
To advance his worldly ambitions had he taken Anne to wife; why should
he scruple, then, to yield her again that thus he might advance those
ambitions further?

If poor Anne argued at all, she must have argued thus. For the rest,
she was told that to be loved by the King was an overwhelming honour,
a matter for nightly prayers of thankfulness. Philip was something very
exalted, hardly human in fact; almost, if not quite, divine. Who and
what was Anne that she should dispute with those who knew the world, and
who placed these facts before her? Never in all her little life had she
belonged to herself. Always had she been the property of somebody else,
to be dealt with as her owner might consider best. If about the Court
she saw some men more nearly of her own age--though there were not many,
for Philip's Court was ever a gloomy, sparsely peopled place--she took
it for granted that such men were not for her. This until I taught her
otherwise, which, however, was not yet a while. Had I been at Court in
those days, I think I should have found the means, at whatever cost, of
preventing that infamy; for I know that I loved her from the day I saw
her. But I was of no more than her own age, and I had not yet been drawn
into that whirlpool.

So she went to the arms of that rachitic prince, and she bore him a
son--for, as all the world knows, the Duke of Prastana owns Philip for
his father. And Eboli increased in power and prosperity and the favour
of his master, and also, no doubt, in the contempt of posterity. There
are times when the thought of posterity and its vengeances is of great
solace.

It would be some six years later when first I came to Court, brought
thither by my father, to enter the service of the Prince of Eboli as one
of his secretaries. As I have told you, I loved the Princess from the
moment I beheld her. From the gossip of the Court I pieced together
her story, and pitied her, and, pitying her, I loved her the more. Her
beauty dazzled me, her charm enmeshed me, and she had grown by now in
worldly wisdom and mental attainments. Yet I set a mask upon my passion,
and walked very circumspectly, for all that by nature I was as reckless
and profligate as all the world could ever call me. She was the wife of
the puissant Secretary of State, the mistress of the King. Who was I to
dispute their property to those exalted ones?

And another consideration stayed me. She seemed to love the King. Young
and lacking in wisdom, this amazed me. In age he compared favourably
with her husband he was but thirteen years older than 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 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
ago 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 that but for Don John of Austria's
affairs, and the intervention in them of the Escovedo whom you say--whom
the world says I murdered, all might have been well to this day.

Escovedo had been, like myself, one of Eboli's secretaries in his day,
and it was this that won him after Eboli's death a place at the Royal
Council board. It was but an inferior place, yet the King remarked him
for a man shrewd and able, who might one day have his uses.

That day was not very long in coming, though the opportunity it afforded
Escovedo was scarcely such as, in his greedy, insatiable ambition, he
had hoped for. Yet the opportunity, such as it was, was afforded him
by me, and had he used it properly it should have carried him far,
certainly much farther than his talent and condition warranted.

It came about through Don John of Austria's dreams of sovereignty. You
will have heard--as who has not?--so much of Don John, the natural son
of Charles V, that I need tell you little concerning him. In body and
soul he was a very different man, indeed, from his half-brother Philip
of Spain. As joyous as Philip was gloomy, as open and frank as Philip
was cloudy and suspicious, and as beautiful as Philip was grotesque, Don
John was the Bayard of our day, the very mirror of all knightly graces.
To the victory of Lepanto, which had made him illustrious as a soldier,
he had added, in '73--the year of Eboli's death--the conquest of Tunis,
thereby completing the triumph of Christianity over the Muslim in the
Mediterranean. Success may have turned his head a little. He was young,
you know, and an emperor's son. He dreamt of an empire for himself, of
sovereignty, and of making Tunis the capital of the kingdom he would
found.

We learnt of this. Indeed, Don John made little secret of his
intentions. But they went not at all with Philip's views. It was far
from his notions that Don John should go founding kingdoms of his own.
His valour and talents were required to be employed for the greater
honour and glory of the Crown of Spain, and nothing further.

Philip consulted me, who was by then the depositary of all his secrets,
the familiar of his inmost desires. There was evidence that Don John's
ambitions were being fomented by his secretary, who dreamt, no doubt,
of his own aggrandizement in the aggrandizement of his master. Philip
proposed the man's removal.

"That would be something," I agreed. "But not enough. He must be
replaced by a man of our own, a man loyal to Your Majesty, who will not
only seek to guide Don John in the course that he should follow, but
will keep close watch upon his projects, and warn you should they
threaten to neglect your interests the interests of Spain, for his own."

"And such a man? Where shall we find him?"

I considered a moment, and bethought me of Escovedo. He was able; he
had charm and an ingratiating manner; I believed him loyal, and imagined
that I could quicken that loyalty by showing him that advancement would
wait upon its observation; he could well be spared from the Council,
where, as I have said, he occupied a quite inferior post; lastly, we
were friends, and I was glad of the opportunity to serve him, and place
him on the road to better things.

All this I said to Philip, and so the matter was concluded. But Escovedo
failed me. His abilities and ingratiating manner endeared him quickly to
Don John, whilst himself he succumbed entirely, not only to Don John
of Austria's great personal charm, but also to Don John's ambitious
projects. The road to advancement upon which I had set him seemed to him
long and toilsome by contrast with the shorter cut that was offered by
his new master's dreams. He fell as the earlier secretary had fallen,
and more grievously, for he was the more ambitious of the two, and from
merely seconding Don John's projects, it was not long before he spurred
them on, not long before he was dreaming dreams of his own for Don John
to realize.

From Tunis, which had by now been recovered by the Turks, and any hopes
concerned with which King Philip had discouraged, the eyes of Don John
were set, at Escovedo's bidding, I believe, upon the crown of England.

He had just been invited by Philip to make ready to take in hand the
affairs of Flanders, sadly disorganized under the incompetent rule of
Alva. It occurred to him that if he were to issue victoriously from that
enterprise--and so far victory had waited upon his every venture--if
he were to succeed in restoring peace and Spanish order in rebellious
Flanders, he would then be able to move against England with the Spanish
troops under his command, overthrow Elizabeth, deliver Mary Stuart from
the captivity in which she languished, and by marriage with her set
the crown of England on his brow. To this great project he sought the
support of Rome, and Rome accorded it very readily being naturally
hostile to the heretic daughter of Anne Boleyn.

It was Escovedo himself who went as Don John's secret ambassador to the
Vatican in this affair Escovedo, who had been placed with Don John to
act as a curb on that young man's ambitions. Nor did he move with the
prudence he should have observed.

Knowledge of what was brewing reached us from the Papal Nuncio in
Madrid, who came to see me one day in the matter.

"I have a dispatch from Rome," he announced, "in which His Holiness
instructs me to enjoin upon the King that the expedition against England
be now executed, and that he consider bestowing its crown upon Don John
of Austria for the greater honour and glory of Holy Church."

I was thunderstruck. The expedition against England, I knew, was no new
project. Three years before a secret envoy from the Queen of Scots, an
Italian named Ridolfi, had come to propose to Philip that, in concert
with the Pope, he should reestablish the Catholic faith in England and
place Mary Stuart upon the throne. It was a scheme attractive to Philip,
since it agreed at once with his policy and his religion. But it had
been abandoned under the dissuasions of Alva, who accounted that it
would be too costly even if successful. Here it was again, emanating now
directly from the Holy See, but in a slightly altered form.

"Why Don John of Austria?" I asked him.

"A great soldier of the faith. And the Queen of Scots must have a
husband."

"I should have thought that she had had husbands enough by now," said I.

"His Holiness does not appear to share that view," he answered tartly.

"I wonder will the King," said I.

"The Catholic King is ever an obedient child of Mother Church," the oily
Nuncio reminded me, to reprove my doubt.

But I knew better--that the King's own policy was the measure of his
obedience. This the Nuncio should learn for himself; for if I knew
anything of Philip's mind, I knew precisely how he would welcome this
proposal.

"Will you see the King now?" I suggested maliciously, anxious to witness
the humbling of his priestly arrogance.

"Not yet. It is upon that I came to see you. I am instructed first to
consult with one Escoda as to the manner in which this matter shall be
presented to His Majesty. Who is Escoda?"

"I never heard of him," said I. "Perhaps he comes from Rome."

"No, no. Strange!" he muttered, frowning, and plucked a parchment from
his sleeve. "It is here." He peered slowly at the writing, and slowly
spelled out the name: "Juan de Escoda."

In a flash it came to me.

"Escovedo you mean," I cried,

"Yes, yes--Escovedo, to be sure," he agreed, having consulted the
writing once more. "Where is he?"

"On his way to Madrid with Don John," I informed him. "He is Don John's
secretary."

"I will do nothing, then, until he arrives," he said, and took his
leave.

Oh, monstrous indiscretion! That dispatch from Rome so cunningly
and secretly contrived in cipher had yet contained no warning that
Escovedo's share in this should be concealed. There are none so
imprudent as the sly. I sought the King at once, and told him all that
I had learnt. He was aghast. Indeed, I never saw him more near to anger.
For Philip of Spain was not the man to show wrath or any other emotion.
He had a fish-like, cold, impenetrable inscrutability. True, his yellow
skin grew yellower, his gaping mouth gaped wider, his goggle eyes
goggled more than usual. Left to himself, I think he would have
disgraced Don John and banished Escovedo there and then, as he did,
indeed, suggest. And I have since had cause enough to wish to God that I
had left him to himself.

"Who will replace Don John in Flanders?" I asked him quietly. He stared
at me. "He is useful to you there. Use him, Sire, to your own ends."

"But they will press this English business."

"Acquiesce."

"Acquiesce? Are you mad?"

"Seem to acquiesce. Temporize. Answer them, 'One thing at a time.'
Say, 'When the Flanders business is happily concluded, we will think of
England.' Give them hope that success in Flanders will dispose you
to support the other project. Thus you offer Don John an incentive to
succeed, yet commit yourself to nothing."

"And this dog Escovedo?"

"Is a dog who betrays himself by his bark. We will listen for it."

And thus it was determined; thus was Don John suckled on the windy pap
of hope when presently he came to Court with Escovedo at his heels.
Distended by that empty fare he went off to the Low Countries, leaving
Escovedo in Madrid to represent him, with secret instructions to advance
his plans.

Now Escovedo's talents were far inferior to my conception of them.

He was just a greedy schemer, without the wit to dissemble his appetite
or the patience necessary to secure attainment.

Affairs in Flanders went none too well, yet that did not set a curb
upon him. He pressed his master's business upon the King with an ardour