A Knight of Spain, page 21
She glanced at these signs of the hasty (angry it happened), departure of her companion with a mixture of disdain and indifference. Her elbows rested on the table, and she held in her right hand a flat goblet full of sparkling golden wine, on the surface of which floated the blood-red petal of a rose.
In herself she was loveliness incarnate. Anyone looking at her as she sat gazing into the wineglass would have known that she must be, in her own time and to all posterity (at least as long as men should remember fair women) famous for her beauty—perhaps for her vice.
She was dressed with the utmost extravagance and the greatest possible display of costly jewels. Her gown was thick white brocade, heavily starred with silver flowers; a huge upstanding collar of gold lace framed her head and neck and opened in front over her bare bosom, which was well displayed by her low-cut violet tissue vest; rope on rope of pearls hung over her corsage round her waist, and pearls were lavishly stitched on the close puffs of her sleeves.
Her face was in the full bloom of loveliness; she was painted, but delicately, and her complexion was pale; her large dark and most expressive eyes were full of tenderness and passion, the upper part of her face was noble in expression and shape, and though her mouth and chin were coarsely beautiful that seemed scarcely a defect in the general dazzle of her brilliant charm.
On her waving dark, yet bright, brown locks she wore a white silk cap, ornamented with emeralds and long white feathers and furnished with two wings of transparent gold work that reached out almost as far as the edges of her ruff.
A long mantle of cloth of gold completed her attire and fell glittering from her shoulders to her feet.
At present an expression of discontent and annoyance clouded her features, and this look brought into prominence the fact that her beauty was not sweet and good, but something corrupt, almost bestial; she seemed a flower sprung from decay, a flower whose bloom would be quickly over and that when it faded would fall into rottenness leaving no perfume behind.
She was in truth, at twenty-three years of age, already a thing that no one spoke of with reverence, save to her face; she was a Queen without a kingdom, a wife without a husband, a Princess without honour, a woman without virtue, and a beauty without a reputation.
After she had stared awhile at the rose petal floating in the amber-coloured wine she turned sharply and rang a silver bell that stood near her elbow.
A page appeared instantly from the back of the chamber.
The lady sipped the wine, then said:—
“Fetch me—” she paused.
The boy glanced at the empty chair.
“Monsieur de Guise, madame?” he asked.
She did not lift her eyes.
“Monsieur de Guise has gone,” she said lazily, “and I do not wish him recalled. But go into the ballroom, my little Mercury, and find me a gentleman sombrely dressed in brown and black.”
“What is his name, madame?”
“He has no name,” she smiled, “for he is in disguise. But in his right ear he wears an ear-ring of a long pearl and a plaited lock of hair.”
“Shall I bring him here, madame?”
“Yes. Say a friend has marked him. Hasten, thou slow one!”
The boy darted away through the rose-coloured curtains and the lady continued to gaze into the wineglass.
Nor did she raise her eyes until she heard footsteps in the antechamber, and knew that her messenger was returning, and not alone, for her sharp ears could detect a second footfall, light as it was.
She looked straight at the curtains; a cavalier in brown and black parted them, the page beside him.
She gave the page a nod, at which he disappeared, and then she rose, showing her full, tall figure.
“Will you take supper with me, Don Juan of Austria?” she asked.
He let the curtains fall together behind him; he had believed himself absolutely unknown to everyone in the Louvre; the blood rushed into his dark cheek and he looked haughtily at the gorgeous beauty.
“Señora,” he said, “I am not Don Juan to-night, but the meanest of your slaves.”
She was pleased at this unsmiling compliment, so different from the gallantries of her own countrymen, as his stately handsomeness was different from their frivolous appearance.
“Then if you are a slave I command you to be seated,” she said, taking her own place again.
He obeyed.
The lady clapped her hands, and two servants in livery appeared.
“Bring supper,” she commanded.
They removed the table that was on little noiseless silver wheels and instantly ran in another, as handsomely appointed and laden with delicate dishes.
“You were not in the ballroom, señora,” said Don Juan.
“No. Presently I will dance with you. You should step the pavane well, being Spanish, eh, Monsieur?”
With soft melancholy eyes (she had noticed at once their peculiar look of dark gold) he was contemplating her marvellous appearance of luxurious beauty and wondering of whom she reminded him; certainly he had seen her likeness in some sweeter, less fair face.
“Do you not know me?” she asked with infinite vanity.
“You must be the most beautiful woman in France,” he answered slowly. “Perhaps in the world, señora.”
He spoke in French but gave her the Spanish title, and it pleased her ear jaded with flattery; she again rested her elbows on the table and held the glass of amber-hued wine in her lovely pink-tipped fingers.
“You knew my sister,” she said.
Juan started with a little shock.
“I am Marguerite de Valois,” added the lady. “You knew my sister Elizabeth.”
“Ah, Dios!” he exclaimed, “so you are the Queen of Navarre.”
“Am I like Elizabeth?” smiled Marguerite.
“She died a saint. God rest her soul!” answered Juan, crossing himself.
“And I am a sinner,” said the Queen, “but her sister.”
“Certainly, I see in you a resemblance to my lady the Queen,” said Juan; “but how did your Majesty know me?”
“Oh, silly,” she laughed, “there are many here who know you—many who saw you in Spain and Italy.”
The ready colour came into his face.
“I have to take up my post as Governor-General of the Low Countries,” he said gravely, “and travel in disguise because the whole country is in the hands of the rebels—thereby, slipping like a thief into the country I must rule,” he added with some bitterness.
Marguerite waved her hand over the table.
“Do none of these meats please you?” she asked. “Give me the honour of having such a famous hero at my poor board.”
“Do me an honour,” replied Juan, “since I now know you. Let me salute you.”
She leant across the table, and his firm lips kissed her smooth pale cheek.
As he touched her he thought of the ilex avenue in the garden of the Escorial; there was some such essence in her hair as Anne of Austria used.
Her eyes flamed and she kept them on the red rose leaf..
“They say that you are very faithless in love,” she remarked.
“Love, señora,” he answered, “has been very faithless with me.”
“That is the manner of love,” replied Marguerite lightly.
He was eating slowly; she served him and took a little herself; her voluptuous presence was encircling him like the odour of an Eastern perfume, slowly filling a chamber from a single box of crushed spices.
She fixed her brilliant eyes on this famous hero; a greater man than any who had ever been in love with her; yet in her heart she mocked him for his birth, and noted with a sneer the royal air in his manner.
“What will you do in the Netherlands?” she asked.
“Conquer the rebels, Majesty, and punish the heretics.”
“My husband is a heretic,” said Marguerite.
“I know.”
“I had a red-liveried marriage,” she added. “You have heard of the Feast of Saint Bartholomew?”
“There are no means but these against the heretics,” he answered gravely.
Her soulless eyes turned again to the wineglass.
“My husband and his Huguenots are again at the throats of my brother and the League,” she said. “And I shall leave the scene of this conflict, therefore you may see me in the Low Countries, Don Juan, for it is likely that I go to Spa for my health.”
He now began to perceive something of her object in sending for him; doubtless she had schemes and intrigues afoot in which he might be useful; he knew that her favourite brother, Francois d’Alenñon, was one of the Princes to whom the Prince of Orange had offered the sovereignty of the Netherlands, and though that Prince was at present commanding against the Huguenots at Issoire, doubtless his clever sister intended, nevertheless, to further his claims in the Low Countries. As this flashed through Don Juan’s mind he felt contempt for the Frenchwoman; he believed that she meant to use him, and no woman had tried to use him yet; those who had loved him had loved him freely and without motive, and those who had hated him had openly worked against him; but this woman he thought would love him and use him and despise him all at once.
She seemed to him base with all the evil weakness of the bad blood of the Valois-Medicis, a fatal mixture that could produce nothing good.
He sat thoughtful, fingering the stem of his glass.
“You travel straight to Brussels?” she asked, and her voice was caressing.
“Yes, Majesty—to Metz, where Count Manfeldt is to meet me, then straight to the Capital.”
“You have,” remarked Marguerite, “a hard task before you.”
He suddenly looked up at her, and suddenly laughed.
Directness was not in his breed nor in hers, or each would have said to the other, “What do you want of me?”; but as it was they understood each other without words.
“They say that you are to marry the Queen of Scots,” said Marguerite.
“When I have pacified the Netherlands, señora.”
She rested her lovely face in the palm of her right hand; he could not help but look at her, he could not help but admire her, and be pleased that he had followed his whim in attending this ball during his short rest in Paris, since it had procured him this conversation with the beauty who was the chief glory of the brilliant Court of France.
He could trace but little likeness to Felipe’s third wife in her features, and none whatever in her manner; surely the gentle Elizabeth had been an angel sent to redeem her weak and wicked house.
To redeem all of them, perhaps, thought Juan sombrely, for he was in one of his melancholies and the whole world seemed clouded by sin and suffering.
The impossible task before him weighed too on his soul; he had just heard that Mondragone had surrendered to the Dutch, that the Spanish soldiers were in a state of mutiny at Antwerp, and that the Prince of Orange had never been so powerful as at the present moment; day by day, in fact, as he proceeded on his journey, had he learnt more and more of the difficulties of the task Felipe had imposed on him as a reward for his long years of brilliant service.
The Queen of Navarre tilled his glass; as she leant towards him he caught again the wafted essence that recalled to him his brother’s wife; then he found himself thinking of Aña de Santafimia.
He had travelled a long way from the white walled room at Alcalà, fresh with the rain-scented atmosphere, to this chamber and the painted Queen whose heart was stained with the blood of that late slaying of the heretics.
His full lips curved into a smile; he kissed Marguerite’s white wrist and the fingers with which she held the silver-gilt flagon she served him with; but she was so adorned with rings and bracelets that he touched pearls and gold, not flesh.
“Whose hair have you in your ear-ring?” asked Marguerite.
“The hair of a dead woman,” he answered, drinking his wine slowly.
“Dead!”
She spoke the word with great contempt.
“Cast it away,” she said, leaning across the table, her whole body one sparkle and glimmer, “and I will give you one of my locks.”
Juan set his glass down.
“She was one and only,” he said, as he had said to Anne of Austria.
“A saint?” smiled Marguerite.
“A saint,” he repeated gravely.
“We shall all be saints when there is no longer any flesh on our bones,” said the Queen of Navarre; she took the wine-soaked rose petal from the glass and put it between her full lips.
“Will you have a curl from my head, Don Juan?” she asked.
“What man would refuse?” he smiled; “but this I wear, I shall always keep.”
“So you are faithful!” she mocked.
“In my fashion.”
He too leant across the table and held out his shapely dark hand.
“Give me the tress.”
“I do not share my favours,” she said sweetly.
“Not even with the dead?”
“With them least of all, for they are rivals impossible to overcome. Who was she, Don Juan?”
“A woman.”
“How fair?”
“I do not know.”
He put down his napkin and rose.
“I am weary, señora. Weary of love and ambition, weary of beauty.”
She rose too, she was almost his height, quite his height with the gold wings and silk cap that crowned her hair; he had never seen anything more gorgeous than her appearance now as she stood looking at him with the bruised red petal between her lips.
“Monsieur de Guise will see you at Joinville,” she said; “he was angry with me because I spoke of you with favour.”
She smiled.
“Au revoir, Don Juan.”
He looked at her with eyes grown sleepy; there was nothing he wanted of her; she represented nothing he desired.
“You have a glorious beauty,” he said; “but methinks it is more for men’s perdition than their salvation.”
“Perhaps,” answered the Queen of Navarre, “I shall see you in the Low Countries.”
With that she vanished between the curtains at the back of the table, leaving him standing alone in the frivolous little room beside the extravagant little supper-table.
Chapter Two – THE POPINJAY
Never had Felipe’s cause in his revolted provinces appeared so hopeless as it did when Don Juan of Austria took up the governorship of the Netherlands.
Even the brief pause between the death of the last governor, Luis de Resquesens, and the arrival of the Prince at his post had been the opportunity for the Hollanders to shake the yoke still more completely from their shoulders; the massacres committed by the Spanish soldiers at Antwerp had only served to increase the resistance of the staunch islanders, whom all Alba’s genius and severities had not been able to quell or even to daunt.
Juan found himself in a maze of international and local politics, in a labyrinth of difficulties; he had to deal with the Estates, the Prince of Orange, the various governors, the representatives of England and France, Valois and Bourbon, the mutinous Spanish troops, and Felipe himself, who in his ignorance and incapacity was endeavouring to keep his hands on all these affairs from his cell in the Escorial.
And by none of these parties and people with whom he worked was Juan trusted; in addition to which he had to contend with a miserable and uncertain supply of money, and the King’s constant delays in answering letters.
The task that had worn out the iron Alba and killed Luis de Resquesens was one altogether beyond the brilliant, gay young soldier.
He did not spare himself; indeed he taxed his strength with an effort that Juan de Escovedo (his one sincere friend now) found both pitiful and heroic, for he was so little suited to the burden laid on him, glorious as he might be in other fields.
It was like, the secretary thought, watching a gallant Arab steed toiling with a heavy load of stones that would have wearied a Flemish plough horse.
It was sad, too, to see how he used himself; almost coining his soul for the King’s service; his youth, his beauty, his charm, his skill in games, his caresses, his gaiety, his splendour, he used them all to win this people who never would be won again by any emissary of Spain.
He rode abroad in state, he feasted the nobles, he flattered the burghers, he made promises to the Estates, he schemed and manoeuvred, he bribed and promised, he reported his progress industriously to the King. He drew up plans for the government of the Netherlands, he laid aside his private pleasures and repose; there was not one minute of his time that was not devoted to serving Felipe.
But, as he had feared from the first, he made little progress; the Catholic nobles of Hainault and Brabant rallied round him, and when he went abroad the peasants sometimes shouted, and when he attended one of the town councils the deputies were respectful enough, but he accomplished nothing that was of value, and he knew that the man who was the real head of the country, though he held no patent, was the Prince of Orange, and he knew that this man laughed at him.
He was astute enough to see from the first that the Prince of Orange, not the Netherlands, was the thing the King had most to dread, and he made several adroit Spanish attempts to buy or bribe this Prince back to his allegiance.
Juan could not conceive that Willem von Nassau could have any motive other than personal advancement in his rebellion, and he firmly believed the end of it was only a matter of finding his price.
Here he worked to a profitless conclusion, for the Prince of Orange was animated by motives that the Spanish Prince could never have understood, and at Juan’s offers he merely smiled, undervaluing, on his side, perhaps, Juan who seemed to him merely a frivolous, empty, willing instrument of tyranny.
But Juan was labouring as hard as Willem, if in an ignoble cause; three times he fell ill from overwork, three times he struggled up white and thin and got back to his letters and his interviews, and his visits, his conferences with the commissions of the Estates, his discussion of the Treaty of Ghent and the Perpetual Edict, his laborious intrigues with the King of France, the Emperor, and the Pope, which even included one (though this he looked upon coldly) of his marriage, not with the captive Mary of Scotland but with the Queen of England, Elizabeth Tudor, who in Gregory’s scheme should be first converted to the true faith.
