HISTORICAL VIGNETTES

GEORGE I

“Halt!” The voice of an officer rang out in the heavy twilight, and with a sudden scream of brakes and jangle of harness the cavalcade came to a stand.

“Tell the Herr von Gastein his Majesty desires to speak with him.” The name ran up the long line, quick and sharp, like a rattle of musketry, and passed out of hearing of him who had uttered it. “Tell the Herr Captain to come at once.”

The Herr Captain was already, on the word, spurring back from the head of the cortège, which was of royal extent. It stood upon a flat road in a flat country, covering more ground than and including almost as many human souls as a modern mail-train. There was the King’s coach for principal item—a veritable little room slung on straps and drawn by eight horses; and there were carriages—seven or eight, and each holding as many people—for his retinue, and baggage-wagons, and a troop of fifty sabres to escort the whole. It took so much, or more, to carry this little corpulent apoplectic on his annual visit to Herrenhausen, whither he had already travelled to within a league or so of Osnabrück and a much-needed night’s rest.

The Captain von Gastein, having dismounted and thrown his reins to a groom, stood at stiff attention by the coach door. He was a patient, somewhat exhausted-looking man of fifty, spare-bodied, and with stone-blue eyes which rather matched the dusty Hanoverian blue of his uniform. His expression at the moment was one of a quiet fatality, as if the summons had not been altogether unforeseen by him.

A preternatural silence seemed to have succeeded the tumult of hoofs and wheels. There was a soundless blink of lightning in the sky, and a windmill on the flat roadside blackened and paled alternately in its flicker, as if it palpitated. It was late June, and the air seemed to have come out of a limekiln. The dust rolled up into it began to settle down sluggishly.

The door of the great travelling-coach opened, and a little bewigged gentleman, who had been peering from behind the glass, descended. His manner was dry, self-important, professional; he was the King’s English physician.

“His Majesty, my dear Captain,” he whispered, “is in a strange mood. You are commanded to ascend and converse with him—you may guess why. The affair of last year—you understand? Old associations are re-awakened, old injuries re-exposed—you were intimately acquainted with their subject. Bear in mind that this sad event has interposed itself between his last departure from and his present revisit to his paternal dominions, and venture upon nothing in the nature of a reminder. If you find him fanciful, excited——”

A querulous voice, breaking from the interior of the carriage, interrupted him:

“Der Herr Jesus! What is all this chatter? Tell the man to enter.”

The physician, placing a warning finger on his lips, skipped to one of the supplementary coaches; the Captain von Gastein climbed into the royal vehicle. A postillion put up the steps; the door was closed, the word given, and the cavalcade lurched on. “Sit,” motioned the King; and the Herr Captain, with what steadiness he could command, settled himself on the edge of the broad seat backing upon the horses, and awaited, rigid and upright.

He was quite alone with his Majesty, and there was plenty of room for them both. The interior of the coach was like a cabinet, and luxuriously upholstered. There were accommodations for writing, card-playing, shaving, coffee-making, and other conveniences. The pace was leisurely, the motion restful; the great wheels turned outside the windows with little apparent sound. The King of England lay in his padded corner opposite, a very weary, moodish little old man. His cheeks bagged, his eyes goggled, strained, and anxious; the silk travelling-cloak in which he was wrapped only partly concealed his immense corpulence, and his thick legs and stumpy feet dangled short of the floor. His head was unwigged, and enveloped in a close cap with a fur border which came down over his eyes.

The officer, observant of everything, for all the respectful rigidity of his vision, could not but be conscious of a certain feeling of repulsion in this his first close contact with the prince to whose unwelcome service, in one most tragic direction, he had devoted the best twenty-five years of his life. Twenty-five years it was since he had been ordered, a young impecunious captain, to the lonely castle of Ahlden on the Aller, where lived, already seven years incarcerated, the beautiful young wife of the then electoral Prince George—Sophia Dorothea, accused, rightly or wrongly, of misconduct with a Swedish adventurer. She was fair; unhappy; her husband had not loved her; the cold cruelty of his temperament had been confessed in this his consignment of her to a living grave. Had she not lain in his arms, borne him children? Gastein had needed no more to inflame his chivalry. Thenceforth he had given himself to the service of this lady, to ameliorate, to the best of his power, her bitter fate. His partiality, his sympathy, being, no doubt, reported, had kept him poor

and unpromoted. For a quarter of a century he had shared his princess’s exile, and had only returned to the world when death had ended that, less than a twelvemonth ago. After thirty-two years! And this was the unlovely Rhadamanthus who had condemned her, this little wheezy, potbellied old frog of a man, who had become Elector of Hanover and King of England in the interval! The Captain had been educated to the right divine succession; but something monstrous in the picture struck him. His convictions and his emotions hurt one another in their efforts at a reconciliation. It was somehow not right that tragic beauty should lie at the mercy of this commonplace. He sat as stiff as a ramrod.

It is one of the most grotesque privileges of royalty to command silence. No one must address it unless addressed. Then, at its word, its gesture, the empty brass pot ceases to tinkle or the golden vessel overflows. This seems an unnatural impost, like taxing a man’s daylight or his drinking-water. It gives an uncanny self-possession to the mortal who levies it. The little swollen tub of a creature, glowering in his corner, mutely discussed the figure opposite for as long as it pleased him, with no more concern, probably less, than he would have shown in regarding a black-beetle; and when he spoke at last it was even with some grudging in his cold, guttural voice.

“You are of the escort, then, mein Herr?”

The Captain, stiffening yet a trifle, saluted. “As your Majesty commanded,” he said.

The other shrugged fretfully.

“I am glad,” he said, “to find something surviving to your sense of duty.”

Von Gastein made no answer. He ought not; he could not, indeed. That sense of warring emotions hurt him like a violent indigestion.

The King, for some minutes, condescended to speak no more, but sat looking out of the window upon the darkening flats and the white ribbon of the road reeling under him. What was in his mind? He had always declared, for some reason, that he would not long survive his wife; and she had died six months ago. Had he somehow cheated Fate—or might he have cheated it had he remained in England? This was his first visit to his patrimony since her death. Her death, her released spirit—turn the coach!

No, his beloved Herrenhausen! The stout little Guelph was no coward for all his love of life and good-living. A murrain on this old wives’ trash of spectres and premonitions! He glanced at the figure opposite—it sat up rigid and grey like a signpost—and, with a scowl, looked out of the window again.

Thirty-two years—a woman of sixty, and she had been a fresh, blooming young wife of twenty-eight when he had consigned her to her living death! Much water, as they said in England, had flowed under London Bridge during that interval—the highways of life had been paved and repaved. Thirty-two years! The Schloss was a dead, dreary place, situated in a dead, dreary country—a mere lonely manor-house in the wilds, good enough for a month’s stay; but—thirty-two years! Gott in Himmel! And she had been vivacious, worldly, sparkling with the glory of being and doing when he had last seen her!

A vision of the castle, as he had known it once or twice in the old, far-off days, rose before him. He saw again the leagues of flat marshland which surrounded it, the reedy river crawling by its walls, the grey alders shivering in the wind, and the wheeling of lonely plovers. He saw the sad towers, the cold, undecorated rooms, the windows looking out upon the lifeless waste of road. The road! the livid unfruitful highway, upon which, for hours at a time, it had been said, dry burning eyes had been set, despairing for the mercy, the deliverance, which never came! For thirty-two years! God in heaven! while the frost of age slowly settled on the beautiful eyes, the deep black hair, the breaking heart! With a writhe, as of physical suffering, the old man turned from his window.

“The life was dull at Schloss Ahlden?” he said.

“Dull, sire.”

The correct, impassive attitude of the Captain maddened while it half cowed him. For a minute he held his breath—only to release it in a sudden question, unexpected, astounding:

“In your eyes, soldier, she was innocent?”

Von Gastein started under the shock—and recovered himself.

“During the twenty-five years, sire, I had the privilege of attending on her the Princess of Ahlden did not fail weekly to take the Sacrament, and on each occasion to avow her innocence before the altar.”

The King stared, then mumbled from loud to low.

“They will avow it,” he began, and broke off quickly. Some words reported to him, as having been uttered by her to one seeking to bring about a reconciliation before his enthronement, recurred to his mind: “If I am guilty, I am not worthy to be your Queen; if I am innocent, your King is not worthy to be my husband.”

A casuistry, feminine, non-committing—hedging, in the true sporting sense. He hardened. This fate had not after all seemed so merciless to one so guilty.

“She had liberty,” he said, as if appealing to his own conscience.

The Captain made a frigid reverence, acquiescing in the enormous lie.

“I say, she had liberty,” repeated the King—“permission to drive abroad.”

“For six miles, sire, back and forth,” answered the soldier, as if he accounted himself addressed: “for six miles west, to the old stone bridge on the Hayden road. So much and no more. At the bridge the escort turned her. On fine days she would drive herself—fast and faster, till the stones spun from the wheels. She would seem to madden for freedom, to outstrip her misery. Many times she would traverse the distance, the lady-in-waiting sitting, the troop spurring at her side; and at the stone bridge it would be always the same. ‘No further?’ ‘No further, madam.’ ‘Ah! but death will release me!’”

He stopped, conscious of his own emotion. He had served the lovely sorrow so long, that its tragedy had become part of himself.

“I crave your Majesty’s forgiveness,” he muttered in a broken voice.

The King spoke up harshly:

“She was limited to that road by necessity.”

“During life, sire.”

The response came swift and involuntary. The soldier gasped, having made it.

“You will stop the coach, and return to your duty,” said the King, blue in the face.

The former commotion was repeated; the physician returned to his patient; the cavalcade rolled on. His Majesty spoke not a single word further, but sat staring from the window. It was deep dusk now without, and the lightning flickered with a ghastlier brilliancy. But still the King would give no order to have the lamps lighted. Instead, he lay with his livid face and protruding eyes addressed to the heavens, and the horror of a thought incessant in his mind. The road was open to her at last, and she was driving to cut him off from Osnabrück, the city in which he had been born. She knew that a man could not die in the room where he was born; and she was coming to forestall him with the dread summons to appear before his Maker, and answer for the thing he had done.

* * * * *

Much agitated, von Gastein remounted his horse, and spurred on to his place in the front. He did more; he drove ahead of all, and took the lead on the solitary road making for Osnabrück. The lights of the city were already faintly starring the distance, when a sound coming from in front startled and then thrilled him. Swift wheels, and the hoofs of a tearing horse! There was nothing uncommon in that; and yet his heart went cold to hear it. “God have mercy on me!” he muttered: “I am a fool!”

Nearer and nearer came the sound—it was close—it was upon him—and there rushed past the shadow of a cabriolet, with a wild woman on the seat flogging a wild black horse. The night of her hair streamed behind like a thin cloud dusted with diamonds, and there was a frenzy of triumph in her eyes, and on her lips a smile. And so she passed and was gone.

The Captain turned his horse’s head, and drove back upon the van.

“Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too late!”

They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented.

“What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this way.”

And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind, and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step by the open door.

“His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a stroke, and is dead!”

FOUQUIER-TINVILLE

“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice, bear, for your consolation, its memory to the scaffold.”

With a stiff smile on his lips, and those words of the President of the reconstituted Court in his ears, Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, late Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turned to follow his guard.

This was at seven o’clock of a May evening, and twelve or fourteen hours remained to him in which to collect his thoughts and settle his affairs. At ten on the following morning the tumbrils would arrive at the archway to the Cour du Mai, and he and his fifteen condemned jurymen would start on their long road of agony to the Place de la Révolution, whither, or elsewhere, on a like errand, he himself had already despatched so many thousands.

Those words of the President somehow haunted him.

So many thousands—dismissed to their deaths, without remorse or pity, from that same salle de la liberté in which he had just stood his own trial! How familiar it had all seemed, how matter-of-course, how inevitable!—the relentless hands of the clock, creeping on to the premeditated doom-stroke; the hungry, bestial faces lolling at the barriers; the voices of the street entering by the open windows, and seeming to comment derisively on the drawling evidence, selected to convict. He had known the procedure so well, had been so instrumental in creating it, that any defence had well seemed a mockery of the methods of the Palais de Justice.

“I have been a busy man,” he had said. “I forget things. Are we to be held accountable for every parasite we destroy in crushing out the life of a monster?”

That had appeared a reasonable plea. What did not seem reasonable was the base sums he had personally amassed out of the destruction of the parasites, the bribes he had accepted, his subornation of witnesses, his deafness to the just pleas of unprofitable virtue, his neglect of the principles of brotherhood. He had held one of the first offices of the fraternal State, and had made of it a wholly self-seeking vehicle. He had seen his chance in the mad battle of a people for liberty, and had used it to rob the dead. There was, in truth, no more despicable joint in that “tail of Robespierre” which Sanson was busily engaged just now in docking than this same Antoine Quentin. And yet he believed himself aggrieved.

That night he wrote to his second wife, from his cell in the Conciergerie, to which he had been returned, the following words:

“I shall die, heart and hands pure, for having served my country with too much zeal and activity, and for having conformed to the wishes of the Government.”

It bettered Wolsey’s cry in the singleness of its reproach.

The problem of all villainy is that it regards itself with an obliquity of vision for which it seems hard to hold it accountable. Given a lack of the moral sense, and how is a man to make an honest living? Tinville—or de Tinville, mark you—became an attorney because he was poor, and then a rascal because he was an attorney. There are always many thousands living in an odour of respectability whom fortune alone saves from a like revelation of themselves. But that is not to say that, in the general purification of society, the lethal chamber is not the best answer to the problem.

This man was by nature a callous, coarse-grained ruffian, constitutionally insensible to the pleas of humanity, and with the self-protective instinct prominently developed in him as in brutes. You could not regard his sallow, grim-jawed face-structure, his staring, over-bushed black eyes, his thin-lipped mouth, perpetually mobile in sneers and spitting scorns and cynicisms, and affect to read in them any under-suggestion of charity or benevolence. Numbers, poor obsequious wretches, had essayed the monstrous pretence, and had pitiably retracted their heresy under the axe. He was forty-seven years of age; he had lived every day of his later manhood in secret scorn and abuse of the principles he had hired himself to advocate; and only where his personal interests were not affected had it ever been possible to credit him with a deed of grace, or, at the best, of passive indifference.

“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice!”

He had done kind things in his time, two or three; but had they ever included “one act of self-sacrifice”? Had he not conceded them, rather, for the very contrary reason? He tried to think it out. The question worried him oddly and persistently; it seemed to have absorbed every other; he groped perpetually for an answer to it through the whirling chaos of his mind. There had been the wife and daughters of the Marquis de Miranion, whom he had shielded in their peril because once, when he had been a young man contemplating Orders, they had shown him kindness. He suddenly remembered the case, and remembered too that his condescension had occurred at a time when the despotic nature of his office had held him virtually immune from criticism or misrepresentation. Again, there had been the young virgins of Verdun, condemned and executed for offering sweetmeats to the King of Prussia. He had pitied them; but pity was inexpensive, and, at the moment, not unpopular. There had been—what else had there been? He flogged his brains for a third instance, and, not being