The Last of the Barons — Complete

Sibyll turned involuntarily as the courtier spoke thus, with animation in his voice, and fire in his eyes; she turned, and her breath came quick; she turned, and her look met his, and those words and that look sank deep into her heart; they called forth brilliant and ambitious dreams; they rooted the growing love, but they aided to make it holy; they gave to the delicious fancy what before it had not paused, on its wing, to sigh for; they gave it that without which all fancy sooner or later dies; they gave it that which, once received in a noble heart, is the excuse for untiring faith; they gave it,—HOPE!

“And thou wouldst say,” replied the lady of Longueville, with a meaning smile, still more emphatically—“thou wouldst say that a youth, brave and well nurtured, ambitious and loving, ought, in the eyes of rank and pride, to be the mate and equal of—”

“Ah, noble dame,” interrupted Hastings, quickly, “I must not prolong encounter with so sharp a wit. Let me leave that answer to this fair maiden, for by rights it is a challenge to her sex, not to mine.”

“How say you, then, Mistress Warner?” said the dame. “Suppose a young heiress, of the loftiest birth, of the broadest lands, of the comeliest form—suppose her wooed by a gentleman poor and stationless, but with a mighty soul, born to achieve greatness, would she lower herself by hearkening to his suit?”

“A maiden, methinks,” answered Sibyll, with reluctant but charming hesitation, “cannot love truly if she love unworthily; and if she love worthily, it is not rank nor wealth she loves.”

“But her parents, sweet mistress, may deem differently; and should not her love refuse submission to their tyranny?” asked Hastings.

“Nay, good my lord, nay,” returned Sibyll, shaking her head with thoughtful demureness. “Surely the wooer, if he love worthily, will not press her to the curse of a child’s disobedience and a parent’s wrath!”

“Shrewdly answered,” said the dame of Longueville. “Then she would renounce the poor gentleman if the parent ordain her to marry a rich lord. Ah, you hesitate, for a woman’s ambition is pleased with the excuse of a child’s obedience.”

Hastings said this so bitterly that Sibyll could not but perceive that some personal feeling gave significance to his words. Yet how could they be applied to him,—to one now in rank and repute equal to the highest below the throne?

“If the demoiselle should so choose,” said the dame of Longueville, “it seemeth to me that the rejected suitor might find it facile to disdain and to forget.”

Hastings made no reply; but that remarkable and deep shade of melancholy which sometimes in his gayest hours startled those who beheld it, and which had, perhaps, induced many of the prophecies that circulated as to the untimely and violent death that should close his bright career, gathered like a cloud over his brow. At this moment the door opened gently, and Robert Hilyard stood at the aperture. He was clad in the dress of a friar, but the raised cowl showed his features to the lady of Longueville, to whom alone he was visible; and those bold features were literally haggard with agitation and alarm. He lifted his finger to his lips, and motioning the lady to follow him, closed the door.

The dame of Longueville rose, and praying her visitors to excuse her absence for a few moments, she left Hastings and Sibyll to themselves.

“Lady,” said Hilyard, in a hollow whisper, as soon as the dame appeared in the low hall, communicating on the one hand with the room just left, on the other with the street, “I fear all will be detected. Hush! Adam and the iron coffer that contains the precious papers have been conducted to Edward’s presence. A terrible explosion, possibly connected with the contrivance, caused such confusion among the guards that Hugh escaped to scare me with his news. Stationed near the gate in this disguise, I ventured to enter the courtyard, and saw—saw—the TORMENTOR! the torturer, the hideous, masked minister of agony, led towards the chambers in which our hapless messenger is examined by the ruthless tyrants. Gloucester, the lynx-eyed mannikin, is there!”

“O Margaret, my queen,” exclaimed the lady of Longueville, “the papers will reveal her whereabout.”

“No, she is safe!” returned Hilyard; “but thy poor scholar, I tremble for him, and for the heads of all whom the papers name.”

“What can be done! Ha! Lord Hastings is here,—he is ever humane and pitiful. Dare we confide in him?”

A bright gleam shot over Hilyard’s face. “Yes, yes; let me confer with him alone. I wait him here,—quick!” The lady hastened back. Hastings was conversing in a low voice with Sibyll. The dame of Longueville whispered in the courtier’s ear, drew him into the hall, and left him alone with the false friar, who had drawn the cowl over his face.

“Lord Hastings,” said Hilyard, speaking rapidly, “you are in danger, if not of loss of life, of loss of favour. You gave a passport to one Warner to see the ex-king Henry. Warner’s simplicity (for he is innocent) hath been duped,—he is made the bearer of secret intelligence from the unhappy gentlemen who still cling to the Lancaster cause. He is suspected, he is examined; he may be questioned by the torture. If the treason be discovered, it was thy hand that signed the passport; the queen, thou knowest, hates thee, the Woodvilles thirst for thy downfall. What handle may this give them! Fly! my lord,—fly to the Tower; thou mayst yet be in time; thy wit can screen all that may otherwise be bare. Save this poor scholar, conceal this correspondence. Hark ye, lord! frown not so haughtily,—that correspondence names thee as one who hast taken the gold of Count Charolois, and whom, therefore, King Louis may outbuy. Look to thyself!”

A slight blush passed over the pale brow of the great statesman, but he answered with a steady voice, “Friar or layman, I care not which, the gold of the heir of Burgundy was a gift, not a bribe. But I need no threats to save, if not too late, from rack and gibbet the life of a guiltless man. I am gone. Hold! bid the maiden, the scholar’s daughter, follow me to the Tower.”

CHAPTER IX. HOW THE DESTRUCTIVE ORGAN OF PRINCE RICHARD PROMISES GOODLY DEVELOPMENT

The Duke of Gloucester approached Adam as he stood gazing on his model. “Old man,” said the prince, touching him with the point of his sheathed dagger, “look up and answer. What converse hast thou held with Henry of Windsor, and who commissioned thee to visit him in his confinement? Speak, and the truth! for by holy Paul, I am one who can detect a lie, and without that door stands—the Tormentor!”

Upon a pleasing and joyous dream broke these harsh words; for Adam then was full of the contrivance by which to repair the defect of the engine, and with this suggestion was blent confusedly the thought that he was now protected by royalty, that he should have means and leisure to accomplish his great design, that he should have friends whose power could obtain its adoption by the king. He raised his eyes, and that young dark face frowned upon him,—the child menacing the sage, brute force in a pigmy shape, having authority of life and death over the giant strength of genius. But these words, which recalled Warner from his existence as philosopher, woke that of the gentle but brave and honourable man which he was, when reduced to earth.

“Sir,” he said gravely, “if I have consented to hold converse with the unhappy, it was not as the tell-tale and the spier. I had formal warrant for my visit, and I was solicited to render it by an early friend and comrade, who sought to be my benefactor in aiding with gold my poor studies for the king’s people.”

“Tut!” said Richard, impatiently, and playing with his dagger hilt; “thy words, stealthy and evasive, prove thy guilt! Sure am I that this iron traitor with its intricate hollows and recesses holds what, unless confessed, will give thee to the hangman! Confess all, and thou art spared.”

“If,” said Adam, mildly, “your Highness—for though I know not your quality, I opine that no one less than royal could so menace—if your Highness imagines that I have been intrusted by a fallen man, wrong me not by supposing that I could fear death more than dishonour; for certes!” continued Adam, with innocent pedantry, “to put the case scholastically, and in the logic familiar, doubtless, to your Highness, either I have something to confess or I have not; if I have—”

“Hound!” interrupted the prince, stamping his foot, “thinkest thou to banter me,—see!” As his foot shook the floor, the door opened, and a man with his arms bare, covered from head to foot in a black gown of serge, with his features concealed by a hideous mask, stood ominously at the aperture.

The prince motioned to the torturer (or tormentor, as he was technically styled) to approach, which he did noiselessly, till he stood, tall, grim, and lowering, beside Adam, like some silent and devouring monster by its prey.

“Dost thou repent thy contumacy? A moment, and I render my questioning to another!”

“Sir,” said Adam, drawing himself up, and with so sudden a change of mien, that his loftiness almost awed even the dauntless Richard,—“sir, my fathers feared not death when they did battle for the throne of England; and why?—because in their loyal valour they placed not the interests of a mortal man, but the cause of imperishable honour! And though their son be a poor scholar, and wears not the spurs of gold; though his frame be weak and his hairs gray, he loveth honour also well eno’ to look without dread on death!”

Fierce and ruthless, when irritated and opposed, as the prince was, he was still in his first youth,—ambition had here no motive to harden him into stone. He was naturally so brave himself that bravery could not fail to win from him something of respect and sympathy, and he was taken wholly by surprise in hearing the language of a knight and hero from one whom he had regarded but as the artful impostor or the despicable intriguer.

He changed countenance as Warner spoke, and remained a moment silent. Then as a thought occurred to him, at which his features relaxed into a half-smile, he beckoned to the tormentor, said a word in his ear, and the horrible intruder nodded and withdrew.

“Master Warner,” then said the prince, in his customary sweet and gliding tones, “it were a pity that so gallant a gentleman should be exposed to peril for adhesion to a cause that can never prosper, and that would be fatal, could it prosper, to our common country. For look you, this Margaret, who is now, we believe, in London” (here he examined Adam’s countenance, which evinced surprise), “this Margaret, who is seeking to rekindle the brand and brennen of civil war, has already sold for base gold to the enemy of the realm, to Louis XI., that very Calais which your fathers, doubtless, lavished their blood to annex to our possessions. Shame on the lewd harlot! What woman so bloody and so dissolute? What man so feeble and craven as her lord?”

“Alas! sir,” said Adam, “I am unfitted for these high considerations of state. I live but for my art, and in it. And now, behold how my kingdom is shaken and rent!” he pointed with so touching a smile, and so simple a sadness, to the broken engine, that Richard was moved.

“Thou lovest this, thy toy? I can comprehend that love for some dumb thing that we have toiled for. Ay!” continued the prince, thoughtfully,—“ay! I have noted myself in life that there are objects, senseless as that mould of iron, which if we labour at them wind round our hearts as if they were flesh and blood. So some men love learning, others glory, others power. Well, man, thou lovest that mechanical? How many years hast thou been about it?”

“From the first to the last, twenty-five years, and it is still incomplete.”

“Um!” said the prince, smiling, “Master Warner, thou hast read of the judgment of Solomon,—how the wise king discovered the truth by ordering the child’s death?”

“It was indeed,” said Adam, unsuspectingly, “a most shrewd suggestion of native wit and clerkly wisdom.”

“Glad am I thou approvest it, Master Warner,” said Richard. And as he spoke the tormentor reappeared with a smith, armed with the implements of his trade.

“Good smith, break into pieces this stubborn iron; bare all its receptacles; leave not one fragment standing on the other! ‘Delenda est tua Carthago,’ Master Warner. There is Latin in answer to thy logic.”

It is impossible to convey any notion of the terror, the rage, the despair, which seized upon the unhappy sage when these words smote his ear, and he saw the smith’s brawny arms swing on high the ponderous hammer. He flung himself between the murderous stroke and his beloved model. He embraced the grim iron tightly. “Kill me!” he exclaimed sublimely, “kill me!—not my THOUGHT!”

“Solomon was verily and indeed a wise king,” said the duke, with a low inward laugh. “And now, man, I have thee! To save thy infant, thine art’s hideous infant, confess the whole!”

It was then that a fierce struggle evidently took place in Adam’s bosom. It was, perhaps—O reader! thou whom pleasure, love, ambition, hatred, avarice, in thine and our ordinary existence, tempt—it was, perhaps, to him the one arch-temptation of a life. In the changing countenance, the heaving breast, the trembling lip, the eyes that closed and opened to close again, as if to shut out the unworthy weakness,—yea, in the whole physical man,—was seen the crisis of the moral struggle. And what, in truth, to him an Edward or a Henry, a Lancaster or a York? Nothing. But still that instinct, that principle, that conscience, ever strongest in those whose eyes are accustomed to the search of truth, prevailed. So he rose suddenly and quietly, drew himself apart, left his work to the Destroyer, and said,—

“Prince, thou art a boy! Let a boy’s voice annihilate that which should have served all time. Strike!”

Richard motioned; the hammer descended, the engine and its appurtenances reeled and crashed, the doors flew open, the wheels rattled, the sparks flew. And Adam Warner fell to the ground, as if the blow had broken his own heart. Little heeding the insensible victim of his hard and cunning policy, Richard advanced to the inspection of the interior recesses of the machinery. But that which promised Adam’s destruction saved him. The heavy stroke had battered in the receptacle of the documents, had buried them in the layers of iron. The faithful Eureka, even amidst its injuries and wrecks, preserved the secret of its master.

The prince, with impatient hands, explored all the apertures yet revealed, and after wasting many minutes in a fruitless search, was about to bid the smith complete the work of destruction, when the door suddenly opened and Lord Hastings entered. His quick eye took in the whole scene; he arrested the lifted arm of the smith, and passing deliberately to Gloucester, said, with a profound reverence, but a half-reproachful smile, “My lord! my lord! your Highness is indeed severe upon my poor scholar.”

“Canst thou answer for thy scholar’s loyalty?” said the duke, gloomily.

Hastings drew the prince aside, and said, in a low tone, “His loyalty! poor man, I know not; but his guilelessness, surely, yes. Look you, sweet prince, I know the interest thou hast in keeping well with the Earl of Warwick, whom I, in sooth, have slight cause to love. Thou hast trusted me with thy young hopes of the Lady Anne; this new Nevile placed about the king, and whose fortunes Warwick hath made his care, hath, I have reason to think, some love passages with the scholar’s daughter,—the daughter came to me for the passport. Shall this Marmaduke Nevile have it to say to his fair kinswoman, with the unforgiving malice of a lover’s memory, that the princely Gloucester stooped to be the torturer of yon poor old man? If there be treason in the scholar or in yon battered craft-work, leave the search to me!”

The duke raised his dark, penetrating eyes to those of Hastings, which did not quail; for here world-genius encountered world-genius, and art, art.

“Thine argument hath more subtlety and circumlocution than suit with simple truth,” said the prince, smiling. “But it is enough to Richard that Hastings wills protection even to a spy!”

Hastings kissed the duke’s hand in silence, and going to the door, he disappeared a moment and returned with Sibyll. As she entered, pale and trembling, Adam rose, and the girl with a wild cry flew to his bosom.

“It is a winsome face, Hastings,” said the duke, dryly. “I pity Master Nevile the lover, and envy my Lord Chamberlain the protector.”

Hastings laughed, for he was well pleased that Richard’s suspicion took that turn.

“And now,” he said, “I suppose Master Nevile and the Duchess of Bedford’s page may enter. Your guard stopped them hitherto. They come for this gentleman from her highness the queen’s mother.”

“Enter, Master Nevile, and you, Sir Page. What is your errand?”

“My lady, the duchess,” said the page, “has sent me to conduct Master Warner to the apartments prepared for him as her special multiplier and alchemist.”

“What!” said the prince, who, unlike the irritable Clarence, made it his policy to show all decorous homage to the queen’s kin, “hath that illustrious lady taken this gentleman into her service? Why announced you not, Master Warner, what at once had saved you from further questioning? Lord Hastings, I thank you now for your intercession.”

Hastings, in answer, pointed archly at Marmaduke, who was aiding Sibyll to support her father. “Do you suspect me still, prince?” he whispered.

The duke shrugged his shoulders, and Adam, breaking from Marmaduke and Sibyll, passed with tottering steps to the shattered labour of his solitary life. He looked at the ruin with mournful despondence, with quivering lips. “Have you done with me?” then he said, bowing his head lowlily, for his pride was gone; “may we—that is, I and this, my poor device—withdraw from your palace? I see we are not fit for kings!”

“Say not so,” said the young duke, gently: “we have now convinced ourselves of our error, and I crave thy pardon, Master Warner, for my harsh dealings. As for this, thy toy, the king’s workmen shall set it right for thee. Smith, call the fellows yonder, to help bear this to—” He paused, and glanced at Hastings.

“To my apartments,” said the chamberlain. “Your Highness may be sure that I will there inspect it. Fear not, Master Warner; no further harm shall chance to thy contrivance.”

“Come, sir, forgive me,” said the duke. With gracious affability the young prince held out his hand, the fingers of which sparkled with costly gems, to the old man. The old man bowed as if his beard would have swept the earth, but he did not touch the hand. He seemed still in a state between dream and reason, life and death: he moved not, spoke not, till the men came to bear the model; and he then followed it, his arms folded in his gown, till, on entering the court, it was borne in a contrary direction from his own, to the chamberlain’s apartment; then wistfully pursuing it with his eyes, he uttered such a sigh as might have come from a resigned father losing the last glimpse of a beloved son.

Richard hesitated a moment, loth to relinquish his research, and doubtful whether to follow the Eureka for renewed investigation; but partly unwilling to compromise his dignity in the eyes of Hastings, should his suspicions prove unfounded, and partly indisposed to risk the displeasure of the vindictive Duchess of Bedford by further molestation of one now under her protection, he reluctantly trusted all further inquiry to the well-known loyalty of Hastings. “If Margaret be in London,” he muttered to himself as he turned slowly away, “now is the time to seize and chain the lioness! Ho, Catesby,—hither (a valuable man that Catesby—a lawyer’s nurturing with a bloodhound’s nature!)—Catesby, while King Edward rides for pleasure, let thou and I track the scent of his foes. If the she-wolf of Anjou hath ventured hither, she hides in some convent or monastery, be sure. See to our palfreys, Catesby! Strange,” added the prince, muttering to himself, “that I am more restless to guard the crown than he who wears it! Nay, a crown is a goodly heirloom in a man’s family, and a fair sight to see near—and near—and near—”

The prince abruptly paused, opened and shut his right hand convulsively, and drew a long sigh.

BOOK IV. INTRIGUES OF THE COURT OF EDWARD IV

CHAPTER I. MARGARET OF ANJOU

The day after the events recorded in the last section of this narrative, and about the hour of noon, Robert Hilyard (still in the reverend disguise in which he had accosted Hastings) bent his way through the labyrinth of alleys that wound in dingy confusion from the Chepe towards the river.

The purlieus of the Thames, in that day of ineffective police, sheltered many who either lived upon plunder, or sought abodes that proffered, at alarm, the facility of flight. Here, sauntering in twos or threes, or lazily reclined by the threshold of plaster huts, might be seen that refuse population which is the unholy offspring of civil war,—disbanded soldiers of either Rose, too inured to violence and strife for peaceful employment, and ready for any enterprise by which keen steel wins bright gold. At length our friend stopped before the gate of a small house, on the very marge of the river, which belonged to one of the many religious orders then existing; but from its site and aspect denoted the poverty seldom their characteristic. Here he knocked; the door was opened by a lay-brother; a sign and a smile were interchanged, and the visitor was ushered into a room belonging to the superior, but given up for the last few days to a foreign priest, to whom the whole community appeared to consider the reverence of a saint was due. And yet this priest, who, seated alone, by a casement which commanded a partial view of the distant Tower of London, received the conspirator, was clad in the humblest serge. His face was smooth and delicate; and the animation of the aspect, the vehement impatience of the gesture, evinced little of the holy calm that should belong to those who have relinquished the affairs of earth for meditation on the things of heaven. To this personage the sturdy Hilyard bowed his manly knees; and casting himself at the priest’s feet, his eyes, his countenance, changed from their customary hardihood and recklessness into an expression at once of reverence and of pity.

“Well, man—well, friend—good friend, tried and leal friend, speak! speak!” exclaimed the priest, in an accent that plainly revealed a foreign birth.

“Oh, gracious lady! all hope is over; I come but to bid you fly. Adam Warner was brought before the usurper; he escaped, indeed, the torture, and was faithful to the trust. But the papers—the secret of the rising—are in the hands of Hastings.”

“How long, O Lord,” said Margaret of Anjou, for she it was, under that reverend disguise, “how long wilt Thou delay the hour of triumph and revenge?”

The princess as she spoke had suffered her hood to fall back, and her pale, commanding countenance, so well fitted to express fiery and terrible emotion, wore that aspect in which many a sentenced man had read his doom,—an aspect the more fearful, inasmuch as the passion that pervaded it did not distort the features, but left them locked, rigid, and marble-like in beauty, as the head of the Medusa.

“The day will dawn at last,” said Hilyard; “but the judgments of Heaven are slow. We are favoured, at the least, that our secret is confined to a man more merciful than his tribe.” He then related to Margaret his interview with Hastings at the house of the Lady Lougueville, and continued: “This morning, not an hour since, I sought him (for last evening he did not leave Edward, a council met at the Tower), and learned that he had detected the documents in the recesses of Warner’s engine. Knowing from your Highness and your spies that he had been open to the gifts of Charolois, I spoke to him plainly of the guerdon that should await his silence. ‘Friar,’ he answered, ‘if in this court and this world I have found it were a fool’s virtue to be more pure than others, and if I know that I should but provoke the wrath of those who profit by Burgundian gold, were I alone to disdain its glitter, I have still eno’ of my younger conscience left me not to make barter of human flesh. Did I give these papers to King Edward, the heads of fifty gallant men, whose error is but loyalty to their ancient sovereign, would glut the doomsman; but,’ he continued, ‘I am yet true to my king and his cause; I shall know how to advise Edward to the frustrating all your schemes. The districts where you hoped a rising will be guarded, the men ye count upon will be watched: the Duke of Gloucester, whose vigilance never sleeps, has learned that the Lady Margaret is in England, disguised as a priest. To-morrow all the religious houses will be searched; if thou knowest where she lies concealed, bid her lose not an hour to fly.’”