The Historical Nights' Entertainment by Rafael Sabatini (most important books to read .txt) 📖

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. Tomorrow I shall expect you.”

 

He looked up at her sitting her great black horse beside which he

had been pacing.

 

“Better not, madame! Better not!” he had said.

 

And then he saw the eyes that had been tender grow charged with

scorn; then came her angry taunt:

 

“You a Spaniard of Spain! I do not believe it!”

 

Oh, there was no doubt that he had angered her. Women of her

temperament are quick to anger as to every emotion. But he had not

wished to anger her. God knows it was never the way of Antonio

Perez to anger lovely women - at least not in this fashion. And it

was an ill return for her gentleness and attention to himself.

Considering this as he sat there now, he resolved that he must make

amends - the only amends it was possible to make.

 

An hour later, in one of the regal rooms of the castle, where he

enjoyed the hospitality of King Henri IV of France and Navarre, he

announced to that most faithful equerry, Gil de Mesa, his intention

of riding to Chantenac to-morrow.

 

“Is it prudent?” quoth Mesa, frowning.

 

“Most imprudent,” answered Don Antonio. “That is why I go.”

 

And on the morrow he went, escorted by a single groom. Gil de Mesa

had begged at first to be allowed to accompany him. But for Gil he

had other work, of which the instructions he left were very full.

The distance was short - three miles along the Gave de Pau - and Don

Antonio covered it on a gently ambling mule, such as might have been

bred to bear some aged dignitary of Holy Church.

 

The lords of Chantenac were as noble, as proud, and as poor as most

great lords of Bearn. Their lineage was long, their rent-rolls

short. And the last marquis had suffered more from this dual

complaint than any of his forbears, and he had