The Last of the Barons — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (reading an ebook .TXT) 📖

loss of the vital parts had occurred in its melancholy dismemberment. But now he turned round and said, “Lady, leave the lore of the stars to their great Maker. I forgive this man, and thank your Grace for your justice. I claim these poor fragments, and crave your leave to suffer me to depart with my device and my child.”

“No, no!” said the duchess, seizing his hand. “Hist! whatever Lord Warwick paid thee, I will double. No time now for alchemy; but for the horoscope, it is the veriest season. I name thee my special astrologer.”

“Accept, accept,” whispered Alwyn; “for your daughter’s sake—for your own—nay, for the Eureka’s!”

Adam bowed his head, and groaned forth, “But I go not hence—no, not a foot—unless this goes with me. Cruel wretch, how he hath deformed it!”

“And now,” cried Alwyn, eagerly, “this wronged and unhappy maiden?”

“Go! be it thine to release and bring her to our presence, good Alwyn,” said the duchess; “she shall lodge with her father, and receive all honour. Follow me, Master Warner.”

No sooner, however, did the friar perceive that Alwyn had gone in search of the jailer, than he arrested the steps of the duchess, and said, with the air of a much-injured man,—

“May it please your Grace to remember that unless the greater magician have all power and aid in thwarting the lesser, the lesser can prevail; and therefore, if your Grace finds, when too late, that Lord Warwick’s or Lord Fitzhugh’s arms prosper, that woe and disaster befall the king, say not it was the fault of Friar Bungey! Such things may be. Nathless I shall still sweat and watch and toil; and if, despite your unhappy favour and encouragement to this hostile sorcerer, the king should beat his enemies, why, then, Friar Bungey is not so powerless as your Grace holds him. I have said—Porkey verbey!—Figilabo et conabo—et perspirabo—et hungerabo—pro vos et vestros, Amen!”

The duchess was struck by this eloquent appeal; but more and more convinced of the dread science of Adam by the evident apprehensions of the redoubted Bungey, and firmly persuaded that she could bribe or induce the former to turn a science that would otherwise be hostile into salutary account, she contented herself with a few words of conciliation and compliment, and summoning the attendants who had followed her, bade them take up the various members of the Eureka (for Adam clearly demonstrated that he would not depart without them) and conducted the philosopher to a lofty chamber, fitted up for the defunct astrologer.

Hither, in a short time, Alwyn had the happiness of leading Sibyll, and witnessing the delighted reunion of the child and father. And then, after he had learned the brief details of their abduction, he related how, baffled in all attempt to trace their clew, he had convinced himself that either the duchess or Bungey was the author of the snare, returned to the Tower, shown the king’s warrant, learned that an old man and a young female had indeed been admitted into the fortress, and hurried at once to the duchess, who, surprised at his narration and complaint, and anxious to regain the services of Warner, had accompanied him at once to the friar.

“And though,” added the goldsmith, “I could indeed procure you lodgings more welcome to ye elsewhere, yet it is well to win the friendship of the duchess, and royalty is ever an ill foe. How came ye to quit the palace?”

Sibyll changed countenance, and her father answered gravely, “We incurred the king’s displeasure, and the excuse was the popular hatred of me and the Eureka.”

“Heaven made the people, and the devil makes three-fourths of what is popular!” bluntly said the man of the middle class, ever against both extremes.

“And how,” asked Sibyll, “how, honoured and true friend, didst thou obtain the king’s warrant, and learn the snare into which we had fallen?”

This time it was Alwyn who changed countenance. He mused a moment, and then frankly answering, “Thou must thank Lord Hastings,” gave the explanation already known to the reader.

But the grateful tears this relation called forth from Sibyll, her clasped hands, her evident emotion of delight and love, so pained poor Alwyn, that he rose abruptly and took his leave.

And now the Eureka was a luxury as peremptorily forbid to the astrologer as it had been to the alchemist! Again the true science was despised, and the false cultivated and honoured. Condemned to calculations which no man (however wise) in that age held altogether delusive, and which yet Adam Warner studied with very qualified belief, it happened by some of those coincidences, which have from time to time appeared to confirm the credulous in judicial astrology, that Adam’s predictions became fulfilled. The duchess was prepared for the first tidings that Edward’s foes fled before him. She was next prepared for the very day in which Warwick landed; and then her respect for the astrologer became strangely mingled with suspicion and terror, when she found that he proceeded to foretell but ominous and evil events; and when at last, still in corroboration of the unhappily too faithful horoscope, came the news of the king’s flight, and the earl’s march upon London, she fled to Friar Bungey in dismay. And Friar Bungey said,—

“Did I not warn you, daughter? Had you suffered me to—”

“True, true!” interrupted the duchess. “Now take, hang, rack, drown, or burn your horrible rival, if you will, but undo the charm, and save us from the earl!”

The friar’s eyes twinkled, but to the first thought of spite and vengeance succeeded another: if he who had made the famous waxen effigies of the Earl of Warwick were now to be found guilty of some atrocious and positive violence upon Master Adam Warner, might not the earl be glad of so good an excuse to put an end to Himself?

“Daughter,” said the friar, at that reflection, and shaking his head mysteriously and sadly, “daughter, it is too late.”

The duchess in great despair flew to the queen. Hitherto she had concealed from her royal daughter the employment she had given to Adam; for Elizabeth, who had herself suffered from the popular belief in Jacquetta’s sorceries, had of late earnestly besought her to lay aside all practices that could be called into question. Now, however, when she confessed to the agitated and distracted queen the retaining of Adam Warner, and his fatal predictions, Elizabeth, who, from discretion and pride, had carefully hidden from her mother (too vehement to keep a secret) that offence in the king, the memory of which had made Warner peculiarly obnoxious to him, exclaimed,—

“Unhappy mother, thou hast employed the very man my fated husband would the most carefully have banished from the palace, the very man who could blast his name.”

The duchess was aghast and thunderstricken.

“If ever I forsake Friar Bungey again!” she muttered; “OH, THE GREAT MAN!”

But events which demand a detailed recital now rapidly pressing on, gave the duchess not even the time to seek further explanation of Elizabeth’s words, much less to determine the doubt that rose in her enlightened mind whether Adam’s spells might not be yet unravelled by the timely execution of the sorcerer!