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Clementina written by A.E.W. Mason

A >> A.E.W. Mason >> Clementina




Meanwhile, in a room of the house two people sat,--one the slight,
graceful man who had accompanied Whittington and whom Gaydon had
correctly guessed to be his King, the other, Maria Vittoria de Caprara.
The Chevalier de St. George was speaking awkwardly with a voice which
broke. Maria listened with a face set and drawn. She was a girl both in
features and complexion of a remarkable purity. Of colour, but for her
red lips, she had none. Her hair was black, her face of a clear pallor
which her hair made yet more pale. Her eyes matched her hair, and were
so bright and quick a starry spark seemed to glow in the depths of them.
She was a poet's simile for night.

The Chevalier ended and sat with his eyes turned away. Maria Vittoria
did not change her attitude, nor for a while did she answer, but the
tears gathered in her eyes and welled over. They ran down her cheeks;
she did not wipe them away, she did not sob, nor did her face alter from
its fixity. She did not even close her eyes. Only the tears rained down
so silently that the Prince was not aware of them. He had even a thought
as he sat with his head averted that she might have shown a trifle more
of distress, and it was almost with a reproach upon his lips that he
turned to her. Never was a man more glad that he had left a word
unspoken. This silent grief of tears cut him to the heart.

"Maria!" he cried, and moved towards her. She made no gesture to repel
him, she did not move, but she spoke in a whisper.

"His Holiness the Pope had consented to our marriage. What would I not
have done for you?"

The Chevalier stooped over her and took her hand. The hand remained
inert in his.

"Maria!"

"Would that I were poor! Would that I were powerless! But I am rich--so
rich. I could have done so much. I am alone--so much alone. What would I
not have done for you?"

"Maria!"

His voice choked upon the word, his lips touched her hair, and she
shivered from head to foot. Then her hand tightened fast upon his; she
drew him down almost fiercely until he sank upon his knees by her side;
she put an arm about his shoulder and held him to her breast.

"But you love me," she said quickly. "Tell me so! Say, 'I love you, I
love you, I love you.' Oh that we both could die, you saying it, I
hearing it,--die to-night, like this, my arm about you, your face
against my heart! My lord, my lord!" and then she flung him from her,
holding him at arm's length. "Say it with your eyes on mine! I can see
though the tears fall. I shall never hear the words again after
to-night. Do not stint me of them; let them flow just as these tears
flow. They will leave no more trace than do my tears."

"Maria, I love you," said the Chevalier. "How I do love you!" He took
her hands from his shoulders and pressed his forehead upon them. She
leaned forward, and in a voice so low it seemed her heart was
whispering, not her mouth, she made her prayer.

"Say that you have no room in your thoughts except for me. Say that you
have no scrap of love--" He dropped her hands and drew away; she caught
him to her. "No, no! Say that you have no scrap of love to toss to the
woman there in Innspruck!"

"Maria!" he exclaimed.

"Hush!" said she, with a woful smile. "To-morrow you shall love her;
to-morrow I will not ask your eyes to dwell on mine or your hand to
quiver as it touches mine. But to-night love no one but me."

For answer he kissed her on the lips. She took his head between her
hands and gave the kiss back, gently as though her lips feared to bruise
his, slowly as though this one moment must content her for all her life.
Then she looked at him for a little, and with a childish movement that
was infinitely sad she laid his face side by side with hers so that his
cheek touched hers.

"Shall I tell you my thought?" she asked. "Shall I dare to tell you it?"

"Tell it me!"

"God has died to-night. Hush! Do not move! Do not speak! Perhaps the
world will slip and crumble if we but stay still." And they remained
thus cheek to cheek silent in the room, staring forward with eyes wide
open and hopeful. The very air seemed to them a-quiver with
expectation. They, too, had an expectant smile upon their lips. But
there was no crack of thunder overhead, no roar of a slipping world.

[Illustration: "CHEEK TO CHEEK, SILENT IN THE ROOM, STARING FORWARD WITH
EYES WIDE OPEN AND HOPEFUL."--_Page 136_.] The Chevalier was the first
to move.

"But we are children," he cried, starting up. "Is it not strange the
very pain which tortures us because we are man and woman should sink us
into children? We sit hoping that a miracle will split the world in
pieces! This is the Caprara Palace; Whittington drowses outside over his
lantern; and to-morrow Gaydon rides with his passport northwards to
Charles Wogan."

The name hurt Maria Vittoria like a physical torture. She beat her hands
together with a cry, "I hate him! I hate him!"

"Yet I have no better servant!"

"Speak no good word of him in my ears! He robs me of you."

"He risks his life for me."

"I will pray that he may lose it."

"Maria!"

The Chevalier started, thrilled and almost appalled by the violence of
her passion.

"I do pray," she cried. "Every fibre in me tingles with the prayer. Oh,
I hate him! Why did you give him leave to rescue her?"

"Could I refuse? I did delay him; I did hesitate. Only to-day Gaydon
receives the passport, and even so I have delayed too long. Indeed,
Maria, I dare not think of the shame, the danger, her Highness has
endured for me, lest my presence here, even for this farewell, should
too bitterly reproach me."

At that all Maria Vittoria's vehemence left her. She fell to beseechings
and entreaties. With her vehemence went also her dignity. She dropped
upon her knees and dragged herself across the room to him. To James her
humility was more terrible than her passion, for passion had always
distinguished her, and he was familiar with it; but pride had always
gone hand in hand with it. He stepped forward and would have raised her
from the ground, but Maria would have none of his help; she crouched at
his feet pleading.

"You told me business would call you to Spain. Go there! Stay there! For
a little--oh, not for long! But for a month, say, after your Princess
comes triumphing into Bologna. Promise me that! I could not bear that
you should meet her as she comes. There would be shouts; I can hear
them. No, I will not have it! I can see her proud cursed face a-flush.
No! You think too much of what she has suffered. If I could have
suffered too! But suffering, shame, humiliation, these fall to women,
always have fallen. We have learnt to bear them so that we feel them
less than you. My dear lord, believe me! Her suffering is no great
thing. If we love we welcome it! Each throb of pain endured for love
becomes a thrill of joy. If I could have suffered too!"

It was strange to hear this girl with the streaming eyes and tormented
face bewail her fate in that she had not won that great privilege of
suffering. She knelt on the ground a splendid image of pain, and longed
for pain that she might prove thereby how little a thing she made of it.
The Chevalier drew a stool to her side and seating himself upon it
clasped her about the waist. She laid her cheek upon his knee just as a
dog will do.

"Sweetheart," said he, "I would have no woman suffer a pang for me had I
my will of the world. But since that may not be, I do not believe that
any woman could be deeper hurt than you are now."

"Not Clementina?"

"No."

Maria uttered a little sigh. Her pain gave her a sort of ownership of
the man who caused it. "Nor can she love as deep," she continued
quietly. "A Sobieski from the snows! Love was born here in Italy. She
robs me of you. I hate her." Then she raised her face eagerly. "Charles
Wogan may fail."

"You do not know him."

"The cleverest have made mistakes and died for them."

"Wogan makes mistakes like another, but somehow gets the better of them
in the end. There was a word he said to me when he begged for my
permission. I told him his plan was a mere dream. He answered he would
dream it true; he will."

"You should have waked him. You were the master, he the servant. You
were the King."

"And when can the King do what he wills instead of what he must? Maria,
if you and I had met before I sent Charles Wogan to search out a wife
for me--"

Maria Vittoria knelt up. She drew herself away.

"He chose her as your wife?"

"If only I had had time to summon him back!"

"He chose her--Charles Wogan. How I hate him!"

"I sent him to make the choice."

"And he might have gone no step beyond Bologna. There was I not a mile
distant ready to his hand! But I was too mean, too despicable--"

"Maria, hush!" And the troubled voice in which he spoke rang with so
much pain that she was at once contrite with remorse.

"My lord, I hurt you, so you see how I am proven mean. Give me your hand
and laugh to me; laugh with your heart and eyes and lips. I am jealous
of your pain. I am a woman. I would have it all, gather it all into my
bosom, and cherish each sharp stab like a flower my lover gives to me. I
am glad of them. They are flowers that will not wither. Add a kiss,
sweetheart, the sharpest stab, and so the chief flower, the very rose of
flowers. There, that is well," and she rose from her knees and turned
away. So she stood for a little, and when she turned again she wore upon
her face the smile which she had bidden rise in his.

"Would we were free!" cried the Chevalier.

"But since we are not, let us show brave faces to the world and hide our
hearts. I do wish you all happiness. But you will go to Spain. There's
a friend's hand in warrant of the wish."

She held out a hand which clasped his firmly without so much as a
tremor.

"Good-night, my friend," said she. "Speak those same words to me, and no
word more. I am tired with the day's doings. I have need of sleep, oh,
great need of it!"

The Chevalier read plainly the overwhelming strain her counterfeit of
friendliness put upon her. He dared not prolong it. Even as he looked at
her, her lips quivered and her eyes swam.

"Good-night, my friend," said he.

She conducted him along a wide gallery to the great staircase where her
lackeys waited. Then he bowed to her and she curtsied low to him, but no
word was spoken by either. This little comedy must needs be played in
pantomime lest the actors should spoil it with a show of broken hearts.

Maria Vittoria went back to the room. She could have hindered Wogan if
she had had the mind. She had the time to betray him; she knew of his
purpose. But the thought of betrayal never so much as entered her
thoughts.

She hated him, she hated Clementina, but she was loyal to her King. She
sat alone in her palace, her chin propped upon her hands, and in a
little in her wide unblinking eyes the tears gathered again and rolled
down her cheeks and on her hands. She wept silently and without a
movement, like a statue weeping.

The Chevalier found Whittington waiting for him, but the candle in his
lantern had burned out.

"I have kept you here a wearisome long time," he said with an effort. It
was not easy for him to speak upon an indifferent matter.

"I had some talk with Major Gaydon which helped me to beguile it," said
Whittington.

"Gaydon!" exclaimed the Chevalier, "are you certain?"

"A man may make mistakes in the darkness," said Whittington.

"To be sure."

"And I never had an eye for faces."

"It was not Gaydon, then?" said the Chevalier.

"It may not have been," said Whittington, "and by the best of good
fortune I said nothing to him of any significance whatever."

The Chevalier was satisfied with the reply. He had chosen the right
attendant for this nocturnal visit. Had Gaydon met with a more observant
man than Whittington outside the Caprara Palace, he might have got a
number of foolish suspicions into his head.

Gaydon, however, was at that moment in his bed, saying to himself that
there were many matters concerning which it would be an impertinence for
him to have one meddlesome thought. By God's blessing he was a soldier
and no politician. He fell asleep comforted by that conclusion.

In the morning Edgar, the Chevalier's secretary, came privately to him.

"The King will receive you now," said he. "Let us go."

"It is broad daylight. We shall be seen."

"Not if the street is empty," said Edgar, looking out of the window.

The street, as it chanced, was for the moment empty. Edgar crossed the
street and rapped quickly with certain pauses between the raps on the
door of that deserted house into which Gaydon had watched men enter. The
door was opened. "Follow me," said Edgar. Gaydon followed him into a
bare passage unswept and with discoloured walls. A man in a little hutch
in the wall opened and closed the door with a string.

Edgar walked forward to the end of the passage with Gaydon at his heels.
The two men came to a flight of stone steps, which they descended. The
steps led to a dark and dripping cellar with no pavement but the mud,
and that depressed into puddles. The air was cold and noisome; the walls
to the touch of Gaydon's hand were greasy with slime. He followed Edgar
across the cellar into a sort of tunnel. Here Edgar drew an end of
candle from his pocket and lighted it. The tunnel was so low that
Gaydon, though a shortish man, could barely hold his head erect. He
followed Edgar to the end and up a flight of winding steps. The air grew
warmer and dryer. They had risen above ground, the spiral wound within
the thickness of a wall. The steps ended abruptly; there was no door
visible; in face of them and on each side the bare stone walls enclosed
them. Edgar stooped down and pressed with his finger on a round
insignificant discolouration of the stone. Then he stood up again.

"You will breathe no word of this passage, Major Gaydon," said he. "The
house was built a century ago when Rome was more troubled than it is
to-day, but the passage was never more useful than now. Men from
England, whose names it would astonish you to know, have trodden these
steps on a secret visit to the King. Ah!" From the wall before their
faces a great slab of the size of a door sank noiselessly down and
disclosed a wooden panel. The panel slid aside. Edgar and Gaydon stepped
into a little cabinet lighted by a single window. The room was empty.
Gaydon took a peep out of the window and saw the Tiber eddying beneath.
Edgar went to a corner and touched a spring. The stone slab rose from
its grooves; the panel slid back across it; at the same moment the door
of the room was opened, and the Chevalier stepped across the threshold.

Gaydon could no longer even pretend to doubt who had walked with
Whittington to the Caprara Palace the night before. It was none of his
business, however, he assured himself. If his King dwelt with emphasis
upon the dangers of the enterprise, it was not his business to remark
upon it or to be thereby disheartened. The King said very graciously
that he would hold the major and his friends in no less esteem if by any
misfortune they came back empty-handed. That was most kind of him, but
it was none of Gaydon's business. The King was ill at ease and looked as
though he had not slept a wink the livelong night. Well, swollen eyes
and a patched pallid face disfigure all men at times, and in any case
they were none of Gaydon's business.

He rode out of Rome that afternoon as the light was failing. He rode at
a quick trot, and did not notice at the corner of a street a big
stalwart man who sauntered along swinging his stick by the tassel with a
vacant look of idleness upon the passers-by. He stopped and directed the
same vacant look at Gaydon.

But he was thinking curiously, "Will he tell Charles Wogan?"

The stalwart man was Harry Whittington.

Gaydon, however, never breathed a word about the Caprara Palace when he
handed the passport to Charles Wogan at Schlestadt. Wogan was sitting
propped up with pillows in a chair, and he asked Gaydon many questions
of the news at Rome, and how the King bore himself.

"The King was not in the best of spirits," said Gaydon.

"With this," cried Wogan, flourishing the passport, "we'll find a means
to hearten him."

Gaydon filled a pipe and lighted it.

"Will you tell me, Wogan," he asked,--"I am by nature curious,--was it
the King who proposed this enterprise to you, or was it you who proposed
it to the King?"

The question had an extraordinary effect. Wogan was startled out of his
chair.

"What do you mean?" he exclaimed fiercely. There was something more than
fierceness in the words,--an accent of fear, it almost seemed to Gaydon.
There was a look almost of fear in his eyes, as though he had let some
appalling secret slip. Gaydon stared at him in wonder, and Wogan
recovered himself with a laugh. "Faith," said he, "it is a question to
perplex a man. I misdoubt but we both had the thought about the same
time. 'Wogan,' said he, 'there's the Princess with a chain on her leg,
so to speak,' and I answered him, 'A chain's a galling sort of thing to
a lady's ankle.' There was little more said if I remember right."

Gaydon nodded as though his curiosity was now satisfied. Wogan's alarm
was strange, no doubt, strange and unexpected like the Chevalier's visit
to the Caprara Palace. Gaydon had a glimpse of dark and troubled waters,
but he turned his face away. They were none of his business.




CHAPTER X


In an hour, however, he returned out of breath and with a face white
from despair. Wogan was still writing at his table, but at his first
glance towards Gaydon he started quickly to his feet, and altogether
forgot to cover over his sheet of paper. He carefully shut the door.

"You have bad news," said he.

"There was never worse," answered Gaydon. He had run so fast, he was so
discomposed, that he could with difficulty speak. But he gasped his bad
news out in the end.

"I went to my brother major to report my return. He was entertaining his
friends. He had a letter this morning from Strasbourg and he read it
aloud. The letter said a rumour was running through the town that the
Chevalier Wogan had already rescued the Princess and was being hotly
pursued on the road to Trent."

If Wogan felt any disquietude he was careful to hide it. He sat
comfortably down upon the sofa.

"I expected rumour would be busy with us," said he, "but never that it
would take so favourable a shape."

"Favourable!" exclaimed Gaydon.

"To be sure, for its falsity will be established to-morrow, and
ridicule cast upon those who spread and believed it. False alarms are
the proper strategy to conceal the real assault. The rumour does us a
service. Our secret is very well kept, for here am I in Schlestadt, and
people living in Schlestadt believe me on the road to Trent. I will go
back with you to the major's and have a laugh at his correspondent.
Courage, my friend. We will give our enemies a month. Let them cry wolf
as often as they will during that month, we'll get into the fold all the
more easily in the end."

Wogan took his hat to accompany Gaydon, but at that moment he heard
another man stumbling in a great haste up the stairs. Misset broke into
the room with a face as discomposed as Gaydon's had been.

"Here's another who has heard the same rumour," said Wogan.

"It is more than a rumour," said Misset. "It is an order, and most
peremptory, from the Court of France, forbidding any officer of Dillon's
regiment to be absent for more than twenty-four hours from his duties on
pain of being broke. Our secret's out. That's the plain truth of the
matter."

He stood by the table drumming with his fingers in a great agitation.
Then his fingers stopped. He had been drumming upon Wogan's sheet of
paper, and the writing on the sheet had suddenly attracted his notice.
It was writing in unusually regular lines. Gaydon, arrested by Misset's
change from restlessness to fixity, looked that way for a second, too,
but he turned his head aside very quickly. Wogan's handwriting was none
of his business.

"We will give them a month," said Wogan, who was conjecturing at the
motive of this order from the Court of France. "No doubt we are
suspected. I never had a hope that we should not be. The Court of
France, you see, can do no less than forbid us, but I should not be
surprised if it winks at us on the sly. We will give them a month.
Colonel Lally is a friend of mine and a friend of the King. We will get
an abatement of that order, so that not one of you shall be cashiered."

"I don't flinch at that," said Misset, "but the secret's out."

"Then we must use the more precautions," said Wogan. He had no doubt
whatever that somehow he would bring the Princess safely out of her
prison to Bologna. It could not be that she was born to be wasted.
Misset, however, was not so confident upon the matter.

"A strange, imperturbable man is Charles Wogan," said he to Gaydon and
O'Toole the same evening. "Did you happen by any chance to cast your eye
over the paper I had my hand on?"

"I did not," said Gaydon, in a great hurry. "It was a private letter, no
doubt."

"It was poetry. There's no need for you to hurry, my friend. It was more
than mere poetry, it was in Latin. I read the first line on the page,
and it ran, '_Te, dum spernit, arat novus accola; max ubi cultam_--'"

Gaydon tore his arm away from Misset. "I'll hear no more of it," he
cried. "Poetry is none of my business."

"There, Dick, you are wrong," said O'Toole, sententiously. Both Misset
and Gaydon came to a dead stop and stared. Never had poetry so strange
an advocate. O'Toole set his great legs apart and his arms akimbo. He
rocked himself backwards and forwards on his heels and toes, while a
benevolent smile of superiority wrinkled across his broad face from ear
to ear. "Yes, I've done it," said he; "I've written poetry. It is a
thing a polite gentleman should be able to do. So I did it. It wasn't in
Latin, because the young lady it was written to didn't understand Latin.
Her name was Lucy, and I rhymed her to 'juicy,' and the pleasure of it
made her purple in the face. There were to have been four lines, but
there were never more than three and a half because I could not think of
a suitable rhyme to O'Toole. Lucy said she knew one, but she would never
tell it me."

Wogan's poetry, however, was of quite a different kind, and had Gaydon
looked at it a trifle more closely, he would have experienced some
relief. It was all about the sorrows and miseries of his unfortunate
race and the cruel oppression of England. England owed all its great men
to Ireland and was currish enough never to acknowledge the debt. Wogan
always grew melancholy and grave-faced on that subject when he had the
leisure to be idle. He thought bitterly of the many Irish officers sent
into exile and killed in the service of alien countries; his sense of
injustice grew into a passionate sort of despair, and the despair
tumbled out of him in sonorous Latin verse written in the Virgilian
measure. He wrote a deal of it during this month of waiting, and a long
while afterwards sent an extract to Dr. Swift and received the great
man's compliments upon its felicity, as anyone may see for himself in
the doctor's correspondence.

How the month passed for James Stuart in Rome may be partly guessed from
a letter which was brought to Wogan by Michael Vezozzi, the Chevalier's
body-servant.

The letter announced that King George of England had offered the
Princess Clementina a dowry of L100,000 if she would marry the Prince of
Baden, and that the Prince of Baden with a numerous following was
already at Innspruck to prosecute his suit.

"I do not know but what her Highness," he wrote, "will receive the best
consolation for her sufferings on my account if she accepts so
favourable a proposal, rather than run so many hazards as she must needs
do as my wife. For myself, I have been summoned most urgently into Spain
and am travelling thither on the instant."

Wogan could make neither head nor tail of the letter. Why should the
King go to Spain at the time when the Princess Clementina might be
expected at Bologna? It was plain that he did not expect Wogan would
succeed. He was disheartened. Wogan came to the conclusion that there
was the whole meaning of the letter. He was, however, for other reasons
glad to receive it.

"It is very well I have this letter," said he, "for until it came I had
no scrap of writing whatever to show either to her Highness or, what I
take to be more important, to her Highness's mother," and he went back
to his poetry.

Misset and his wife, on the other hand, drove forward to the town of
Colmar, where they bought a travelling carriage and the necessaries for
the journey. Misset left his wife at Colmar, but returned every
twenty-four hours himself. They made the excuse that Misset had won a
deal of money at play and was minded to lay it out in presents to his
wife. The stratagem had a wonderful success at Schlestadt, especially
amongst the ladies, who could do nothing day and night but praise in
their husbands' hearing so excellent a mode of disposing of one's
winnings.