The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

for Heaven or Chance

to do the rest. I don’t know whether the palace cleaners will come

here to-day as it is All Saints’, or to-morrow, which will be All

Souls’. Should any one come, I shall run for it the moment the

door is opened, and you had best follow me. If no one comes, I

shall not move from here, and if I die of hunger, so much the worse.”

 

It was a speech that flung the monk into a passion. In burning

terms he reviled Casanova, calling him a madman, a seducer, a

deceiver, a liar. Casanova let him rave. It was just striking six.

Precisely an hour had elapsed since they had left the attic.

 

Balbi, in his red flannel waistcoat and his puce-coloured leather

breeches, might have passed for a peasant; but Casanova, in torn

garments that were soaked in blood, presented an appearance that

was terrifying and suspicious. This he proceeded to repair.

Tearing a handkerchief, he made shift to bandage his wounds, and

then from his bundle he took his fine taffeta summer suit, which

on a winter’s day must render him ridiculous.

 

He dressed his thick, dark brown hair as best he could, drew on a

pair of white stockings, and donned three lace shirts one over

another. His fine cloak of floss silk he gave to Balbi, who looked

for all the world as if he had stolen it.

 

Thus dressed, his fine hat laced with point of Spain on his head,

Casanova opened a window and looked out. At once he was seen by

some idlers in the courtyard, who, amazed at his appearance there,

and conceiving that he must have been locked in by mistake on the

previous day, went off at once to advise the porter. Meanwhile,

Casanova, vexed at having shown himself where he had not expected

any one, and little guessing how excellently this was to serve his

ends, left the window and went to sit beside the angry friar, who

greeted him with fresh revilings.

 

A sound of steps and a rattle of keys stemmed Balbi’s reproaches

in full flow. The lock groaned.

 

“Not a word,” said Casanova to the monk, “but follow me.”

 

Holding his spontoon ready., but concealed under his coat, he

stepped to the side of the door. It opened, and the porter, who

had come alone and bareheaded, stared in stupefaction at the

strange apparition of Casanova.

 

Casanova took advantage of that paralyzing amazement. Without

uttering a word, he stepped quickly across the threshold, and with

Balbi close upon his heels, he went down the Giant’s Staircase in

a flash, crossed the little square, reached the canal, bundled Balbi

into the first gondola he found there, and jumped in after him.

 

“I want to go to Fusine, and quickly,” he announced. “Call another

oarsman.”

 

All was ready, and in a moment the gondola was skimming the canal.

Dressed in his unseasonable suit, and accompanied by the still

more ridiculous figure of Balbi in his gaudy cloak and without a

hat, he imagined he would be taken for a charlatan or an astrologer.

 

The gondola slipped past the custom-house, and took the canal of

the Giudecca. Halfway down this, Casanova put his head out of the

little cabin to address the gondolier in the poop.

 

“Do you think we shall reach Mestre in an hour?”

 

“Mestre?” quoth the gondolier. “But you said Fusine.”

 

“No, no, I said Mestre - at least, I intended to say Mestre.”

 

And so the gondola was headed for Mestre by a gondolier who professed

himself ready to convey his excellency to England if he desired it.

 

The sun was rising, and the water assumed an opalescent hue. It was

a delicious morning, Casanova tells us, and I suspect that never had

any morning seemed to that audacious, amiable rascal as delicious as

this upon which he regained his liberty, which no man ever valued

more highly.

 

In spirit he was already safely over the frontiers of the Most

Serene Republic, impatient to transfer his body thither, as he

shortly did, through vicissitudes that are a narrative in themselves,

and no part of this story of his escape from the Piombi and the

Venetian Inquisitors of State.

 

XIII. THE NIGHT OF MASQUERADE

 

THE ASSASSINATION OF GUSTAVUS III OF SWEDEN

 

Baron Bjelke sprang from his carriage almost before it had come to

a standstill and without waiting for the footman to let down the

steps. With a haste entirely foreign to a person of his station

and importance, he swept into the great vestibule of the palace,

and in a quivering voice flung a question at the first lackey he

encountered:

 

“Has His Majesty started yet?”

 

“Not yet, my lord.”

 

The answer lessened his haste, but not his agitation. He cast off

the heavy wolfskin pelisse in which he had been wrapped, and,

leaving it in the hands of the servant, went briskly up the grand

staircase, a tall, youthful figure, very graceful in the suit of

black he wore.

 

As he passed through a succession of ante-rooms on his way to the

private apartments of the King, those present observed the pallor

of his clean-cut face under the auburn tie-wig he affected, and the

feverish glow of eyes that took account of no one. They could not

guess that Baron Bjelke, the King’s secretary and favourite,

carried in his hands the life of his royal master, or its equivalent

in the shape of the secret of the plot to assassinate him.

 

In many ways Bjelke was no better than the other profligate minions

of the profligate Gustavus of Sweden. But he had this advantage over

them, that his intellect was above their average. He had detected

the first signs of the approach of that storm which the King himself

had so heedlessly provoked. He knew, as much by reason as by

intuition, that, in these days when the neighbouring State of France

writhed in the throes of a terrific revolution against monarchic and

aristocratic tyranny, it was not safe for a king to persist in the

abuse of his parasitic power. New ideas of socialism were in the

air. They were spreading through Europe, and it was not only in

France that men accounted it an infamous anachronism that the great

mass of a community should toil and sweat and suffer for the benefit

of an insolent minority.

 

Already had there been trouble with the peasantry in Sweden, and

Bjelke had endangered his position as a royal favourite by presuming

to warn his master. Gustavus III desired amusement, not wisdom,

from those about him. He could not be brought to realize the

responsibilities which kingship imposes upon a man. It has been

pretended that he was endowed with great gifts of mind. He may have

been, though the thing has been pretended of so many princes that

one may be sceptical where evidence is lacking. If he possessed

those gifts, he succeeded wonderfully in concealing them under a

nature that was frivolously gay, dissolute, and extravagant.

 

His extravagance forced him into monstrous extortions when only a

madman would have wasted in profligacy the wealth so cruelly wrung

from long-suffering subjects. From extortion he was driven by his

desperate need of money into flagrant dishonesty. At a stroke of

the pen he had reduced the value of the paper currency by one-third

- a reduction so violent and sudden that, whilst it impoverished

many, it involved some in absolute ruin - and this that he might

gratify his appetite for magnificence and enrich the rapacious

favourites who shared his profligacy.

 

The unrest in the kingdom spread. It was no longer a question of

the resentment of a more or less docile peasantry whose first

stirrings of revolt were easily quelled. The lesser nobility of

Sweden were angered by a measure - following upon so many others

- that bore peculiarly heavily upon themselves; and out of that

anger, fanned by one man - John Jacob Ankarstrom - who had felt the

vindictive spirit of royal injustice, flamed in secret the

conspiracy against the King’s life which Bjelke had discovered.

 

He had discovered it by the perilous course of joining the

conspirators. He had won their confidence, and they recognized that

his collaboration was rendered invaluable by the position he held

so near the King. And in his subtle wisdom, at considerable danger

to himself, Bjelke had kept his counsel. He had waited until now,

until the moment when the blow was about to fall, before making the

disclosure which should not only save Gustavus, but enable him to

cast a net in which all the plotters must be caught. And he hoped

that when Gustavus perceived the narrowness of his escape, and the

reality of the dangers amid which he walked, he would consider the

wisdom of taking another course in future.

 

He had reached the door of the last antechamber, when a detaining

hand was laid upon his arm. He found himself accosted by a page

- the offspring of one of the noblest families in Sweden, and the

son of one of Bjelke’s closest friends, a fair-haired, impudent boy

to whom the secretary permitted a certain familiarity.

 

“Are you on your way to the King, Baron?” the lad inquired.

 

“I am, Carl. What is it?”

 

“A letter for His Majesty - a note fragrant as a midsummer rose -

which a servant has just delivered to me. Will you take it?”

 

“Give it to me, impudence,” said Bjelke, the ghost of a smile

lighting for a moment his white face.

 

He took the letter and passed on into the last antechamber, which

was empty of all but a single chamberlain-in-waiting. This

chamberlain bowed respectfully to the Baron.

 

“His Majesty?” said Bjelke.

 

“He is dressing. Shall I announce Your Excellency?”

 

“Pray do.”

 

The chamberlain vanished, and Bjelke was left alone. Waiting, he

stood there, idly fingering the scented note he had received from

the page. As he turned it in his fingers the superscription came

uppermost, and he turned it no more. His eyes lost their absorbed

look, their glance quickened into attention, a frown shaped itself

between them like a scar; his breathing, suspended a moment, was

renewed with a gasp. He stepped aside to a table bearing a score

of candles clustered in a massive silver branch, and held the note

so that the light fell full upon the writing.

 

Standing thus, he passed a hand over his eyes and stared again, two

hectic spots burning now in his white cheeks. Abruptly, disregarding

the superscription, his trembling fingers snapped the blank seal and

unfolded the letter addressed to his royal master. He was still

reading when the chamberlain returned to announce that the King was

pleased to see the Baron at once. He did not seem to hear the

announcement. His attention was all upon the letter, his lips drawn

back from his teeth in a grin, and beads of perspiration glistening

upon his brow.

 

“His Majesty - ” the chamberlain was beginning to repeat, when he

broke off suddenly. “Your Excellency is ill?”

 

“Ill?”

 

Bjelke stared at him with glassy eyes. He crumpled the letter in

his hand and stuffed one and the other into the pocket of his black

satin coat. He attempted to laugh to reassure the startled

chamberlain, and achieved a ghastly grimace.

 

“I must not keep His Majesty waiting,” he said thickly, and stumbled

on, leaving in the chamberlain’s mind a suspicion that His Majesty’s

secretary was not quite sober.

 

But Bjelke so far conquered his emotion that he was almost his usual

imperturbable self when he reached the royal dressing-room; indeed,

he no longer displayed