“Scatter _them, scatter them ere the Death cometh! They are like
black crows seeking carrion, and where they watch some soul is doomed
to hell. From afar they spy their prey, and on the roof they gather,
waiting till it fall._”
These words of a fanatic priest, denouncing the Huguenots, were for
ever in his brain from the moment of the rising of the dark bird. They
had rung in its haunted corridors before, had he known it; but it was
the rising of the bird which had doomed it to their eternal
possession. It had happened in this way:
With the first weak breaking of dawn, three pallid, guilty figures
came stealing into a little chamber of the Louvre which overlooked the
_basse-cour_ notched into that angle of the palace which faced towards
St. Germain l’Auxerrois. They were the King, his mother, and his
brother the Duc D’Anjou. An unnatural quiet brooded over the city. It
suggested the paralysed horror of a sleeper awakened to sudden
consciousness of some ghastly presence in his room. They stood, in a
little quaking group, peering from the window upon the courtyard and
the quay of the Louvre, both in seeming dark and empty, and in seeming
uncannily close beneath. What if some tigerish bound were to clear
that interval, and they, the gloating Cæsars of the arena, be made
the sport of their own blood-lust? The King’s hand twitched on the
musquetoon he carried.
The river, a livid tongue, lapped up the blackness; the wind fell all
in a moment, like a shot bird, and rustling its wings a little on the
pavement, died and gave place to silence utter and profound. Suddenly
in the distance a pistol rattled out.
It was followed by the bells. At first it was only the tocsin of St.
Germain l’Auxerrois, the shattering boom of the great bronze dome
shouting death from its tower. But soon other bells took up the tale,
the signal leaping on from height to height, as warning beacons are
fired, and in the same breath the streets were full of armed men. They
seemed to spring from the ground, like the dragon men of Thebes, and
to fall as instantly to slaughter and destruction. Every second they
gathered, and roaring and sweeping on, crashed in the last defences of
sleep and woke the city to pandemonium. And then came the King’s
madness.
He had fought against it to the end. Even in the little ghostly
chamber his soul had risen, in a final revolt of sanity, against the
merciless policy which had set itself deliberately to undermine his
reason. But he had not the strength to escape. His hand, with the
dagger in it, had been held from first to last by his mother
Catherine, as mothers of a human mould direct the little stumbling
hands of their children in forming letters with a pen; and not to him
was due the significance of the characters which that bloody stylus
had written upon the wall. His old nurse, indeed, whom next to Marie
Touchet and her child he most dearly loved, was a staunch Huguenot.
And he kept the wit to save her; but he could not save the good
Admiral Coligny whom he honoured. His mother had her way with him at
last, and was herself panic-struck by the fury of the blaze she had
fuelled.
Having once tasted blood, he cried for it, for more and more until the
gutters choked; insulted the fallen who appealed to him for mercy;
decoyed the partisans of Condé and Navarre into his toils with
cunning messages, and chuckled to see them butchered in the Court
below. The roar, the rushing tumult of the quays, the yells of the
pursuers, the screams of agony of the smitten, the bells and the guns,
all danced in his mad veins and wrought him to frenzy. He outscreamed
the victims; he fired at the corpses floating in the river; he laughed
and stared alternately. Once, early in the business, a boatful of
Huguenots, coming across the water from the opposite faubourg, was
emptied out in a twinkling, and its human load dragged for slaughter
across the stones. They had believed it all an affair of the Guisea,
and had come to beg protection of the King. The King! what shadow of
justification was theirs? A King of shreds and patches! He cursed
their monstrous credulity; he pointed his piece and fired straight
into the breast of the tallest fool of them all, who had fallen on his
back on the stones immediately below. With the sound of his shot a
great black bird rose straight from out the dead man, and flapping
upwards with solemn wings, disappeared over the roof of the Louvre.
The King threw down his musquetoon, and stood staring.
They said that it was a raven, its master’s constant companion, his
pet, his mascot, which he seldom let from his bosom when he went
abroad. The King did not contradict them; the mortal distress in him
found even some solace in the fable. But in his deep heart he knew
that the apparition had been none other than the black soul of the
Huguenot, and that it had flown to settle on the roof, to watch for
the passing of another soul, his own, already doomed by it to hell.
“_Ere the death cometh!_” From that moment, as he believed, he was
marked down; and the thought of how he might elude the bird on the
roof never left him. If he could only circumvent it, he might yet be
saved.
He was sitting with his suite, days after the massacre, in a chamber
of the palace, when a sudden uproar overhead startled them all. It was
evening, but the tapers were not yet lit. The sound was hideous--a
sound as of a multitude of lost spirits screaming and blaspheming in
the upper air. It was the eve of St. Bartholomew all over again, the
pent-up terrors of it broken loose and re-enacted, Even in their
graves, it seemed, the ghosts could not be held down, but had burst
their bloody cerements and risen in an uncontrollable agony of memory.
Where would it end? Where could it? There was no mowing down spirits
by sword and fire; they had the upper hand now, and the minds and
reasons of the living were their ghastly prey. Rising, as they looked
at one another with grey faces, the group one and all sought the open
air.
What was it? A black cloud of crows, no more; a flock in constant
motion, circling, settling and resettling--calling for a second glut
of victims. They had learned to imitate the voices of the massacre,
screeching, sobbing, praying--a horrible thing. They were the souls of
the murdered, ministers of hell, come to await their turn on the roof.
The King said no word, but that same night, after he had slept a
little from exhaustion, he rose suddenly in a horror too great for
speech, and sat staring and listening. His good old nurse hurried to
him; he whispered to her, Did she not hear it? Those haunted chambers
of his brain were full of wild trampings, and execrations, and the
hubbub of a mad conflict. He declared there was a riot in the town,
that he would have his guard dispatched to end it, that he wanted no
more murder. They returned in a little to say that the whole city
slept peaceful in the moonlight, though it was true that the air was
curiously agitated, as by the hot vapour above an oven. He dismissed
them, and dropped his weary head upon his nurse’s bosom. He was her
child again, her nursling, her little frightened dreamer waking in the
dark.
“They shall not touch thee, Charlot,” she whispered. “Thou didst not
mean it, thou.”
For seven nights was this repeated, the noises, the horror, the
collapse; and then the crows departed. Like a black cloud they
gathered in a moment, and drifted away northwards to wait for the
coming of the Armada.
“Are they all gone?” asked the pallid King. He would trust to nobody
but his nurse. She went out, and looked along the ridge of the roof,
and returned.
“All but one,” she said; “and he is hurt belike, and will not last out
the night.”
“That is the one,” he answered, “and he will last out the night of my
life. O, nurse! he waiteth for my soul, and, so he marketh its passage
hence, he will seize it, and I am damned for ever.”
“That then shall he never do, Charlot,” she exclaimed; “for I will
have him shot here and now.”
The King shook his head; and, indeed, he expressed what he knew. The
crow was never shot; the bird seemed to bear a charmed life; but all
of a sudden one day it was gone.
To say that he breathed again would imply but a qualified respite,
inasmuch as his every breath was a pain to him. Through all that
autumn and through all the ensuing year he was a dying man, and in the
May that followed he lay down on his bed for the last time. At the end
he spoke little but with the shapes that haunted him. He lay on his
couch, wrapped in a robe that, for all its lightness, it hurt his
chest to lift. He suffered intolerably, both mentally and physically.
His faithful little wife, whose love he had neglected, came and sat by
his side, silent, with large haunted eyes, and prayed for him, and
wept secretly, and blew her little red nose softly to explain her need
for a handkerchief. And Marie Touchet came with their child, and
wondered how, at the last, the wreck of sweet royalty differed so
little from all other human wrecks. He made his peace with these, but
he could not with himself. The vision of the crow was eternally in his
mind; his atom of trust in the strong faith of his nurse was his
solitary grain of comfort in a world of terrors. He floated in crimson
streams, and rose choking from them, foul and horrible. “Ah, nurse,”
he sighed perpetually, “what blood and what murders!”
She was always ready with the faith, with the triumphant word that
touched like a healing judgment.
“Let them that called the feast answer for the reckoning.”
And so the hours crept on to the end.
One day, as she watched alone beside him, he fell asleep. He had made
his testament that morning, had committed the sore destinies of his
kingdom to his mother and his brother of Navarre, and, exhausted with
the effort, had fallen back on his pillow, breathing out the last
words he was ever to utter on earth:
“I thank my God that I leave no male child behind me to wear my
crown!”
It was as still as death. The sunshine came through the open window,
and threw a patch of light on the floor. As the tired nurse sat
watching this, half hypnotised by the glow, of a sudden she saw it
blotted by a soft shadow. She raised her eyes quickly, and there on
the windowsill, black and motionless, was perched a great crow.
She did not even start; but she turned her head and looked at the
King’s face. The sign of the awful change was overspreading it; the
nostrils pulsed; the fingers below picked feebly at the silken robe.
In a few moments, she saw, he would be gone. She rose quickly, and
moved across to the window. The dark bird never stirred. There seemed
a deep, unearthly movement in the sleek gloom of its eyes, and that
was all. It was absorbed in watching, but not her. She flung out her
hands, and caught it in a grip of iron.
“Charlot!” she cried, “my babe! Die while I hold him!”
There was a rustle behind her, a sudden cry, a drumming as of feet
running, speeding from the earth and life; and then all fell silent.
But not the bird. He leaped and battled in her hands. His beak was an
inky dagger, his talons rakes of steel. His screams seared her
heart--they seemed uttered in it; his pinions beat on her brain. But
she held on, driving in her nails, her teeth set and her resolution.
She felt the blood pouring down her wrists, and she cared no whit, so
long as she could keep the horror from pursuing her nursling. And
presently the struggles slackened, and she felt the bird die in her
hands.
Holding it thus away from her, she went to the window and flung it
forth. It dropped without sound, like a shadow that had suddenly been
blown from her brain. She looked at her hands--they were unhurt; at
the King--he lay with a smile on his dead lips.