The Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medici, was giving a ball,
characteristically insolent in its conception, at the royal palace of
the Louvre. All the principal ladies of the Court were invited to
attend it, and each was to be accompanied by her _cavaliere-servente_,
wearing her mistress’s livery.
“I beg you, madam, to excuse yourself,” said the Duc de Guise to his
wife. “It is a censorious age, and your condescensions might be
misconstrued.”
He was a tall, well-figured man, with a somewhat supercilious
expression, emphasised by a prominent underlip. The cut of his face,
cold and aquiline, against his ruff, suggested a cameo in high relief.
His beard, of a bright brown, was “stilettoed”; a scar defaced his
left cheek near the eye, and, in its fading or flushing, betrayed the
degree of his emotions. It was curiously in evidence now, though his
voice and manner kept their measured quiet.
“Condescensions--to whom, _mon chéri_?” asked the Duchess, whisking
round as she sat under the hands of her tire-woman. She was a beauty,
once a princess of Cleves, and as saucy and wilful as she was
bewitching. Her husband, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the
attendant.
“To M. Saint-Mesgrin, madam,” he said.
She laughed. “Thou hast named my chosen cavalier, Henri. What an odd
chance!”
Saint-Mesgrin was one of the King’s mignons, and his name and the
lovely Duchess’s were too often associated of late for the Guise’s
tolerance.
“Is it not?” he said. “I cannot imagine what suggested it.”
He took a sweetmeat from a little gold box, in shape like a shell,
that he carried, and put it between his lips.
“I could not believe,” said the lady, pouting and in an aggrieved
voice, “that the Duc de Guise would condescend to jealousy.”
“Nor does he, madam,” answered the Duke. “It is his honour for which
he is concerned.”
She flounced a shoulder on him.
“O, very well, monsieur! You know best what is worth your
consideration. But, if I were a man, I should not, I think, consign my
honour to the keeping of a despised wife. Will you be pleased to call
back my maid?”
“You persist, then, in going?”
“Will you call Celestine?”
“Your mere presence there, and in such company, will be construed, you
must understand, into a justification for all the calumnies and
slanders which have pursued your name of late.”
“What matter, if you do not so construe it? You are not jealous,
_grâce à Dieu_. And as to that great matter of your honour, I will
put it for safe custody into the hands of Saint-Mesgrin, and you can
ask him for an account of it when you please.”
“To be sure I shall, and very soon perhaps. You will go to the ball,
then, madam?”
“You know I must not disappoint the Queen-Mother,” she said hotly; but
a certain trepidation was beginning to flutter her heart.
“You are resolved?”
“Will you stop me?”
“By no means.”
She laughed defiantly.
“O, most certainly I shall go then!”
The Duke rose, and bowed very gravely.
“I wish you a good night, madam,” he said. “Go, and enjoy yourself
while you may.”
She bit her lip as he left the room. For a moment she was half
resolved to yield her pride to the panic fear that had seized her; but
the perverse demon prevailed, and she called back her woman.
She went to the questionable ball, and the night passed for her in a
sort of conscious delirium peopled with shapes of gaudy terror. The
King, the Queen-Mother, even Saint-Mesgrin himself, seemed forms of
demoniac malice, luring her on to her damnation. She longed, and yet
feared, to fly the unreal pandemonium. Her own peaceful bed figured to
her as something pathetic beyond words--a haven of dear refuge which
she had forfeited for ever.
At length, at five o’clock in the morning, the ball broke up, and she
hurried home with what feverish haste the crowd would permit her. At
bed, in the Hôtel de Guise, she cowered beneath the coverlets, and,
the attendants dismissed, lay shivering like a mouse in a trap. She
hardly dared to breathe, for fear of evoking some menacing echo. She
could have thought that something horrible, like a monstrous cat,
crouched outside her door.
All of a sudden her heart seemed to stop. Quick, soft steps were
coming down the corridor, and the next moment her door opened, and the
Duke, followed by a servitor bearing a bowl of broth on a salver,
entered the room.
She uttered a little stifled cry. There was something even horrible
and suggestive in the choice of the attendant, who was a small,
vacant-faced deaf-mute much employed by her husband on secret
services. She sat up in her dishevelled beauty, white and panting.
“O, Henri, _mon ami_,” she whispered, “you have frightened me so!”
He locked the door behind him and came forward, his eyes brilliant,
his lips smiling.
“That is a sad result of my consideration,” he said. “I foresaw very
well that your heated blood would prevent you from sleeping, and that
a counter caloric would be necessary for your rest. Thank my
foresight, madam, and drink down this broth.”
“No, Henri--no, no!”
“_Peste!_ this is a peevish return, _ma mie_. Are you such a child to
cry at your draught, and when it comes in so pleasant a disguise? Why,
it needs no physician to see the excited wakefulness in your eyes.
Down with it, and you will sleep--take my word for it.”
“Henri, before God I have done no harm!”
“What resistance--out of all proportion with the act! Who said you had
done harm--or, if he thought it, would dream of retaliating with such
kindness. Come, shut your eyes and gulp.”
“I will not indeed.”
Desperate to run, she put a foot over the bedside. He held her back
with a force gentle but irresistible.
“Henri!” she cried in agony, “I was wretched all the evening--O,
believe me!”
“Ah! I thought you did a mistaken thing in going. What a pity you
rejected my advice!”
She shrank from him, her throat gulping, her eyes clouded with horror.
“Your voice is cold,” she whispered--“cold, cold as your eyes, as your
heart. O, Death! Will you have no mercy? Henri!”
“Why, you are overwrought, lady. This is foolish. Come, the broth is
cooling.”
“Must I drink it?”
“To please me.”
“My confessor first--only for five minutes.”
“What! for a dose of medicine? You speak as though it were poison--the
_morceau italianizé_! And even were it, what could lie to confess in
so clear a conscience?”
“You never loved me. Give me the bowl.”
“I will hold it to your lips.”
“No, no, you cannot, you will not.”
“You make me obstinate, madam. I am not wont to be disobeyed.”
“O, horror!”
“I never loved you, you say. Do you love me?”
“Before God, yes!”
“A little thing to refuse your love. Come now, it must be done!”
A shudder convulsed her whole frame; and then suddenly she stiffened,
white as ashes.
“I will drink it,” she said, “and then perhaps you will believe in
me.”
With a hand as steady as a rock he held the bowl to her lips. Her
teeth chattered on its rim a moment, and then she drank, and stopped.
“To the dregs,” he said quietly.
She took the cup from his hand, and, looking him straight in the eyes,
drained it, threw it from her, and closing her lids, lay back.
One moment he stood gazing down, then, beckoning to his attendant,
very softly left the room, locking the door behind him.
She never moved, she never opened her eyes. Still, as though death had
already seized her, she lay there, a creeping rigor seeming to
paralyse her limbs. Only her brain was busy, deliriously, unceasingly,
gnawing like a rat in an empty house. What conscious reason it
possessed was absorbed exclusively in the coming horror of her
passing. She was stunned beyond any thought of eternity, or of the
part her sinful soul must play in it. Love--the love of earth, of man,
of power--was a thing shrunk to insignificance, a dreary, discredited
enchantment. The thought of the poison that possessed her absorbed her
whole being. She had nothing left in common with that sweet, fantastic
conceit, a desirable woman. She was gold turned grey and acrid from
contact with mercury--a thing preposterous and contaminated. How was
the bane about to act, to assert its hideous mastery? Already strange
stings and tremors were apparent in her veins. Was she to be drugged
into a merciful oblivion, or wrenched and distorted out of all
semblance to humanity? Fearful memories of tales she had heard
whispered thronged into her mind. He would not have spared her the
worst; why should he, a vengeance revealed so soulless, so
calculatingly diabolic?
She felt the poison creeping up her veins. When it reached her heart,
it would seize on there, she knew, and tear her to death with its
red-hot fangs. A mortal terror throttled her; she was dying, helpless,
abandoned, alone to all eternity. With a supreme effort she struggled
momentarily out of the shadows, and uttered a choking scream.
The key turned in the lock and her husband entered.
“What is it, _ma mie_?” he said, and hurried to her side.
She turned a grey and ghastly face to him.
“The poison--O, the poison!”
“What poison?”
“The broth!”
“Foolish! It was just broth, no more. I swear it on my honour.”
“Henri!” Her hands began to tremble. He caught them in his own.
“I had hoped it would cure thy fever,” he said.
“It is cured,” she answered, and burst into overwhelming tears.
He took her into his arms. “Hush!” he said. “We have passed some
unhappy hours, _mignonne_, each for the other’s sake. Now shall we
call quits?”
[The End]