The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
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CHAPTER V.
THE CANDLE OMEN.
In the meantime the Royal Family had continued their road to Paris. Thepace was so slow and delayed that it was six o'clock before the carriagecontaining so much sorrow, hatred, passions and innocence, arrived atthe city bars.
During the journey the Dauphin had complained of being hungry. There wasno want of bread as many of the pikes and bayonets were holding uploaves and the Queen would have asked Gilbert to get one, if he had beenby. She could not ask the mob, whom she held in horror.
"Wait till we are in the Tuileries Palace this evening," she said,hugging the boy to her.
"But these men have plenty," he protested.
"But that is theirs, not ours. And they went all the way to Versaillesfor it as there was none in Paris, these three days."
"Have they not eaten for three days?" said the Prince. "Then they mustbe awful hungry, mamma."
Etiquet ordered him to address his mother as Madam, but he was hungry asa poor boy and he called her mamma as a poor boy would his mother.
Ceasing to grieve, he tried to sleep. Poor royal babe, who would crymany times yet for bread before he died.
At the bars a halt was made, not to repose but to rejoice over thearrival. It was hailed with song and dance. A strange scene almost asterrifying in this joy as the others had been for ghastliness.
The fishmarket-women got off their horses, captured from the slainLifeguardsmen, hanging their swords and carbines to the horns. Otherwomen and the market-girls jumped off their cannon, which appeared intheir alarming smoothness.
They all joined hands and danced around the royal carriage. Separatingit from the deputies and the National Guard, an omen of what was tofollow. This round dance had the good intention to set the enforcedguests at ease: the men and women capered, kissed, hugged and sangtogether. The men lifted up their partners as in Teniers' pictures.
This went on as night was falling, on a dark and rainy day, so that thedancing by the light of torches and the gun-stocks and fireworks, tookfantastic effects of light and shade almost infernal.
After half an hour all shouted a general hurrah; all the firearms wereshot off at risk of shooting somebody; and the bullets came down in thepuddles with a sinister plash.
The prince and his sister wept; they were too frightened to feelhungered.
At the City Hall a line of troops prevented the crowd from entering theplace. Here the Queen perceived her foster-brother, and confidentialservant, Weber, an Austrian who had followed her fortunes from home, andwas trying to pass the cordon and go in with her. To be more useful tothe Queen he had put on a National Guard uniform and added the insigniaof a staff-officer. The Royal Groom had lent him a horse. Not to excitesuspicion he kept at a distance during the journey. Now he ran up at hercall.
"What have you come for?" she demanded; "you will be useless here whileat the Tuileries you will be needed. If you do not go on before, nothingwill be ready for our accommodation."
"Capital idea that," said the King.
The Queen had spoken in German and the King had replied in English as hedid not speak the other tongue though understanding it.
The bystanders held foreign tongues in horror, and they murmured andthis swelled to a roar when the square opened and let the coach rollthrough.
The welcoming speech was made by Billy, Mayor of Paris, who played theKing a scurvy trick by repeating his answer: "I always come withpleasure and confidence among my good people of Paris," without the word"confidence" which spoilt matters, and he was taken to task by the Queenfor it.
It was not till ten o'clock that the royal carriage got back to theTuileries where Weber had done the best he could for them.
Count Provence had gone to Luxembourg Palace.
Weber had located the Royal Family in Countess Lamarck's rooms, but thecomforts were limited. For instance there was no room for CountessCharny at supper and she talked of spending the night in a chair forwant of a bed. But knowing the great favor in which the Queen held thecountess, they placed a couch for her in the next room to the Queen's.
The latter shuddered at this for she thought of the count being with hiswife, and Andrea saw the emotion.
"There must be some corner for me elsewhere," said she; "I will go findit."
"You are right, countess," said the King while Marie Antoinette mumbledsomething unintelligible. "We will do something better to-morrow."
The King watched the stately countess go out, while he held the plate tohis mouth.
"That lady is a delightful creature," he said, "and Charny ought to behappy to find such a phoenix at court."
The Queen leant back in her chair to hide her sensation, not from thespeaker, but from his sister Elizabeth, who was frightened lest she hadfallen ill.
The Queen did not breathe at ease till alone in her room.
She had heard her daughter say her prayers, speaking a little longerthan usual as she was pleading for her brother who had gone to restforgetting to say his.
Sitting alone at a table, somehow she had the panorama of her life passbefore her.
She recalled that she was born on the second of November, 1755, the dayof the Lisbon earthquake, which swallowed up fifty thousand souls andextended five thousand miles.
She recalled that the room she slept in, in France, at Strasburg,represented the Massacre of the Innocents and so frightened her in theflickering lamplight that she had always retained a terrible memory ofher first night on French soil.
She recalled how, stopping at Taverney House, she had been shown in thegardens by Baron Balsamo the image of an unknown instrument fordecapitation: this was the man who, under the name of Cagliostro, hadexercised a fatal influence on her destiny, as witness his hand in theQueen's Necklace trial; though she was advised that he had perished inthe papal dungeons as a magician and atheist, had she not seen him thisday in the mob during the halt at Sevres?
She recalled that in Madam Lebrun's portrait she had unwittingly madeher pose as the unfortunate Henrietta Maria of England, in her portrait,as Wife of Charles I. the Beheaded.
She recalled how, when she got out of her coach for the first time atVersailles, in that Marble Court where so much blood lately flowed onher behalf, a lightning stroke had flashed so extraordinarily thatMarshal Richelieu had said: "An evil omen!" albeit he was a cynic noteasily startled by superstition.
She was recalling all this when a reddish cloud, from her eyes beingstrained, thickened around her, and one of the four candles in thecandelabrum went out without evident cause.
While she was looking at it, still smoking, it seemed to her that thenext taper to it paled sensibly, and turning red and then blue in theflame, faded away and lengthened upward, as if to quit the wick, fromwhich it leaped altogether. It was extinguished, as though by an unseenbreath from below.
She had watched the death of this with haggard eyes and panting bosom,and her hands went out towards the candlestick proportionable to theeclipse. When gone out, she closed her eyes, drew back in her armchair,and ran her hand over her forehead, streaming with perspiration.
When she opened them anew, after ten minutes, she perceived that theflame of the third candle was affected like the rest.
She believed it was a dream or that she was under some hallucination.She tried to rise but seemed nailed to her chair. She wanted to call herdaughter, whom she would not have aroused a few minutes before for asecond crown, but her voice died away in her throat. She tried to turnher head but it was rigid as if the third light expiring attracted hereyes and breath. Like the other pair, it changed hue and swaying to oneside and the other, finally shot itself out.
Then fear had such mastery that speech returned to her and that made herfeel restored in courage.
"I am not going to distress myself because three candles happened to goout," she said; "but if the fourth suffers the same fate, then woe isme!"
Suddenly, without going through the transitions of the others, withoutlengthening or flutterin
g to left or right as if the death-angel winghad wafted it, the fourth flame went out.
She screamed with terror, rose, reeled and fell to the floor.
At this appeal the door opened and Andrea, white and silent in hernight-wrapper appeared like a ghost on the sill. When she had revivedher mistress with the mechanical action of one impelled by sheer duty,the Queen remembered all the presage, and aware that it was a womanbeside her, flung her arms round her neck, and cried:
"Save me, defend me!"
"Your Majesty needs no defense among her friends," said Andrea, "and youappear free of the swoon in which you fell."
"Countess Charny," gasped the other, letting go of her whom she hadembraced, and almost repelling her in the first impulse.
Neither the feeling nor the expression had escaped the lady. But sheremained motionless to impassibility.
"I shall undress alone," faltered the Queen. "Return to your room, asyou must require sleep."
"I shall go back, not to sleep but to watch over your Majesty'sslumber," returned Andrea, respectfully curtseying to the other andstalking away with the solemn step of a vitalized statue.