Sir Norman drew his own sword, and stood on the defence, breathed one thought to Leoline, gave himself up for lost; but before quite doing so--to use a phrase not altogether as original as it might be--"determined to sell his life as dearly as possible." Angry eyes and fierce faces were on every hand, and his dreams of matrimony and Leoline seemed about to terminate then and there, when luck came to his side, in the shape of her most gracious majesty the queen. Springing to her feet, she waved her sceptre, while her black eyes flashed as fiercely as the best of them, and her voice rang out like a trumpet-tone.
"Sheathe your swords, my lords, and back every man of you! Not one hair of his head shall fall without my permission; and the first who lays hands on him until that consent is given, shall die, if I have to shoot him myself! Sir Norman Kingsley, stand near, and fear not. At his peril, let one of them touch you!"
Sir Norman bent on one knee, and raised the gracious hand to his lips.
At the fierce, ringing, imperious tone, all involuntarily fell back, as if they were accustomed to obey it; and the prince, who seemed to-night in an uncommonly facetious mood, laughed again, long and shrill.
"What are your majesty"s commands?" asked the discomfited duke, rather sulkily. "Is this insulting interloper to go free?"
"That is no affair of yours, my lord duke!" answered the spirited voice of the queen. "Be good enough to finish Lord Gloucester"s trial; and until then I will be responsible for the safekeeping of Sir Norman Kingsley."
"And after that, he is to go free eh, your majesty?" said the dwarf, laughing to that extent that he ran the risk of rupturing an artery.
"After that, it shall be precisely as I please!" replied the ringing voice; while the black eyes flashed anything but loving glances upon him. "While I am queen here, I shall be obeyed; when I am queen no longer, you may do as you please! My lords" (turning her pa.s.sionate, beautiful face to the hushed audience), "am I or am I not sovereign here!"
"Madame, you alone are our sovereign lady and queen!"
"Then, when I condescend to command, you shall obey! Do you, your highness, and you, lord duke, go on with the Earl of Gloucester"s trial, and I will be the stranger"s jailer."
"She is right," said the dwarf, his fierce little eyes gleaming with a malignant light; "let us do one thing before another; and after we have settled Gloucester here, we will attend to this man"s case. Guards keep a sharp eye on your new prisoner. Ladies and gentlemen, be good enough to resume your seats. Now, your grace, continue the trial."
"Where did we leave off?" inquired his grace, looking rather at a loss, and scowling vengeance dire at the handsome queen and her handsome protege, as he sank back in his chair of state.
"The earl was confessing his guilt, or about to do so. Pray, my lord,"
said the dwarf, glaring upon the pallid prisoner, "were you not saying you had betrayed us to the king?"
A breathless silence followed the question--everybody seemed to hold his very breath to listen. Even the queen leaned forward and awaited the answer eagerly, and the many eyes that had been riveted on Sir Norman since his entrance, left him now for the first time and settled on the prisoner. A piteous spectacle that prisoner was--his face whiter than the snowy nymphs behind the throne, and so distorted with fear, fury, and guilt, that it looked scarcely human. Twice he opened his eyes to reply, and twice all sounds died away in a choking gasp.
"Do you hear his highness?" sharply inquired the lord high chancellor, reaching over the great seal, and giving the unhappy Earl of Gloucester a rap on the head with it, "Why do you not answer?"
"Pardon! Pardon!" exclaimed the earl, in a husky whisper. "Do not believe the tales they tell you of me. For Heaven"s sake, spare my life!"
"Confess!" thundered the dwarf, striking the table with his clinched fist, until all the papers thereon jumped spasmodically into the air-"confess at once, or I shall run you through where you stand!"
The earl, with a perfect screech of terror, flung himself flat upon his face and hands before the queen, with such force, that Sir Norman expected to see his countenance make a hole in the floor.
"O madame! spare me! spare me! spare me! Have mercy on me as you hope for mercy yourself!"
She recoiled, and drew back her very garments from his touch, as if that touch was pollution, eyeing him the while with a glance frigid and pitiless as death.
"There is no mercy for traitors!" she coldly said. "Confess your guilt, and expect no pardon from me!"
"Lift him up!" shouted the dwarf, clawing the air with his hands, as if he could have clawed the heart out of his victim"s body; "back with him to his place, guards, and see that he does not leave it again!"
Squirming, and writhing, and twisting himself in their grasp, in very uncomfortable and eel-like fashion, the earl was dragged back to his place, and forcibly held there by two of the guards, while his face grew so ghastly and convulsed that Sir Norman turned away his head, and could not bear to look at it.
"Confess!" once more yelled the dwarf in a terrible voice, while his still more terrible eyes flashed sparks of fire--"confess, or by all that"s sacred it shall be tortured out of you. Guards, bring me the thumb-screws, and let us see if they will not exercise the dumb devil by which our ghastly friend is possessed!"
"No, no, no!" shrieked the earl, while the foam flew from his lips. "I confess! I confess! I confess!"
"Good! And what do you confess?" said the duke blandly, leaning forward, while the dwarf fell back with a yell of laughter at the success of his ruse.
"I confess all--everything--anything! only spare my life!"
"Do you confess to having told Charles, King of England, the secrets of our kingdom and this place?" said the duke, sternly rapping down the pet.i.tion with a roll of parchment.
The earl grew, if possible, a more ghastly white. "I do--I must! but oh!
for the love of--"
"Never mind love," cut in the inexorable duke, "it is a subject that has nothing whatever to do with the present case. Did you or did you not receive for the aforesaid information a large sum of money?"
"I did; but my lord, my lord, spare--"
"Which sum of money you have concealed," continued the duke, with another frown and a sharp rap. "Now the question is, where have you concealed it?"
"I will tell you, with all my heart, only spare my life!"
"Tell us first, and we will think about your life afterward. Let me advise you as a friend, my lord, to tell at once, and truthfully," said the duke, toying negligently with the thumb-screws.
"It is buried at the north corner of the old wall at the head of Bradshaw"s grave. You shall have that and a thousandfold more if you"ll only pardon--"
"Enough!" broke in the dwarf, with the look and tone of an exultant demon. "That is all we want! My lord duke, give me the death-warrant, and while her majesty signs it, I will p.r.o.nounce his doom!"
The duke handed him a roll of parchment, which he glanced critically over, and handed to the queen for her autograph. That royal lady spread the vellum on her knee, took the pen and affixed her signature as coolly as if she were inditing a sonnet in an alb.u.m. Then his highness, with a face that fairly scintillated with demoniac delight, stood up and fixed his eyes on the ghastly prisoner, and spoke in a voice that reverberated like the tolling of a death-bell through the room.
"My Lord of Gloucester, you have been tried by a council of your fellow-peers, presided over by her royal self, and found guilty of high treason. Your sentence is that you be taken hence, immediately, to the block, and there be beheaded, in punishment of your crime."
His highness wound up this somewhat solemn speech, rather inconsistently, bursting out into one of his shrillest peals of laughter; and the miserable Earl of Gloucester, with a gasping, unearthly cry, fell back in the arms of the attendants. Dead and oppressive silence reigned; and Sir Norman, who half believed all along the whole thing was a farce, began to feel an uncomfortable sense of chill creeping over him, and to think that, though practical jokes were excellent things in their way, there was yet a possibility of carrying them a little too far. The disagreeable silence was first broken by the dwarf, who, after gloating for a moment over his victim"s convulsive spasms, sprang nimbly from his chair of dignity and held out his arm for the queen. The queen arose, which seemed to be a sign for everybody else to do the same, and all began forming themselves in a sort of line of march.
"What is to be done with this other prisoner, your highness?" inquired the duke, making a poke with his forefinger at Sir Norman. "Is he to stay here, or is he to accompany us?"
His highness turned round, and putting his face close up to Sir Norman"s favored him with a malignant grin.
"You"d like to come, wouldn"t you, my dear young friend?"
"Really," said Sir Norman, drawing back and returning the dwarf"s stare with compound interest, "that depends altogether on the nature of the entertainment; but, at the same time, I"m much obliged to you for consulting my inclinations."
This reply nearly overset his highness"s gravity once more, but he checked his mirth after the first irresistible squeal; and finding the company were all arranged in the order of going, and awaiting his sovereign pleasure, he turned.
"Let him come," he said, with his countenance still distorted by inward merriment; "It will do him good to see how we punish offenders here, and teach him what he is to expect himself. Is your majesty ready?"
"My majesty has been ready and waiting for the last five minutes,"
replied the lady, over-looking his proffered hand with grand disdain, and stepping lightly down from her throne.
Her rising was the signal for the unseen band to strike up a grand triumphant "Io paean," though, had the "Rogue"s March" been a popular melody in those times, it would have suited the procession much more admirably. The queen and the dwarf went first, and a vivid contrast they were--she so young, so beautiful, so proud, so disdainfully cold; he so ugly, so stunted, so deformed, so fiendish. After them went the band of sylphs in white, then the chancellor, archbishop, and emba.s.sadors; next the whole court of ladies and gentlemen; and after them Sir Norman, in the custody of two of the soldiers. The condemned earl came last, or rather allowed himself to be dragged by his four guards; for he seemed to have become perfectly palsied and dumb with fear. Keeping time to the triumphant march, and preserving dismal silence, the procession wound its way along the room and through a great archway heretofore hidden by the tapestry now lifted lightly by the nymphs. A long stone pa.s.sage, carpeted with crimson and gold, and brilliantly illuminated like the grand saloon they had left, was thus revealed, and three similar archways appeared at the extremity, one to the right and left, and one directly before them. The procession pa.s.sed through the one to the left, and Sir Norman started in dismay to find himself in the most gloomy apartment he had ever beheld in his life. It was all covered with black--walls, ceiling, and floor were draped in black, and reminded him forcibly of La Masque"s chamber of horrors, only this was more repellant. It was lighted, or rather the gloom was troubled, by a few spectral tapers of black wax in ebony candlesticks, that seemed absolutely to turn black, and make the horrible place more horrible.
There was no furniture--neither couch, chair, nor table nothing but a sort of stage at the upper end of the room, with something that looked like a seat upon it, and both were shrouded with the same dismal drapery. But it was no seat; for everybody stood, arranging themselves silently and noiselessly around the walls, with the queen and the dwarf at their head, and near this elevation stood a tall, black statue, wearing a mask, and leaning on a bright, dreadful, glittering axe. The music changed to an unearthly dirge, so weird and blood-curdling, that Sir Norman could have put his hands over his ear-drums to shut out the ghastly sound. The dismal room, the voiceless spectators, the black spectre with the glittering axe, the fearful music, struck a chill to his inmost heart.
Could it be possible they were really going to murder the unhappy wretch? and could all those beautiful ladies--could that surpa.s.singly beautiful queen, stand there serenely unmoved, to witness such a crime?
While he yet looked round in horror, the doomed man, already apparently almost dead with fear, was dragged forward by his guards. Paralyzed as he was, at sight of the stage which he knew to be the scaffold, he uttered shriek after shriek of frenzied despair, and struggled like a madman to get free. But as well might Laoc.o.o.n have struggled in the folds of the serpent; they pulled him on, bound him hand and foot, and held his head forcibly down on the block.