Oddsfish! Part 71

When I came to the door of them, all was in confusion. There was but one guard here--(for the other was within with the Earl of Craven)--and a little crowd was pestering him with questions. I made no bones with him, but slipped in, and ran upstairs as fast as I could. There was no one in the first antechamber at all, and the door was open into the private closet beyond. It was contrary to all etiquette to enter this unbidden, but I cared nothing for that, and ran through; and this again was empty; so I pa.s.sed out at the further door and found myself at the head of a little stair leading down into a wide lobby, from which opened out two or three chambers, with the King's bedchamber at the further end. And here, in the lobby, I ran into the company.

There was above a dozen persons there, at least, all talking together in low voices; but I saw no one I cared to speak with, since I had no business in the place at all. But no one paid any attention to me. It was yet pretty dark here, for there were no candles; so I waited, leaning against the wall at the head of the stairs.

Then the voices grew louder; and the crowd opened out a little to let someone through; and there came, walking very quickly, and talking together, my Lord Craven leaning on the arm of my Lord Ailesbury. My Lord Craven--near ninety years old at this time--was in his full-dress as colonel of the foot-guards, for he had attended a few minutes before to receive from His Majesty the pa.s.s-word of the day: and my Lord Ailesbury was but half dressed with his points hanging loose; for he had been all undressed just now, when the King had been taken ill.

After they had pa.s.sed by me I stood again to wait; but, almost immediately, across the further end of the lobby I saw Mr. Chiffinch pa.s.s swiftly from a door on the left to a door on the right. At that sight I determined to wait no longer: for there was but one thought in my mind, all this while.

I said nothing, but I came down the stairs and laid my hand on the shoulder of a physician (I think he was), who stood in front of me, and pushed him aside, as if I had a right to be there; and so I went through them very quickly, and into the room where I had seen Mr. Chiffinch go.

The door was ajar: I pushed it open and went in.

It was a pretty small room, and there were no beds in it; it had presses round the walls: a coal fire burned in the hearth in a brazier, and a round table was in the midst, lit by a single candle, and near the candle stood a heap of surgical instruments and a roll of bandages.

(This was the room, I learned later, next to the Royal Bedchamber, where the surgeons had attended half an hour ago to dress the King's heel.) There were three persons in the room beyond the table, talking very earnestly together. Two of them I did not know; but the third was Mr.

Chiffinch. They all three turned when I came in, and stared at me.

"Why--" began the page--"Mr. Mallock, what do you--"

He came towards me with an air of impatience.

"Mr. Chiffinch," said I, in a low voice--"how is His Majesty. I--"

The further door which stood at the head of three or four steps leading up to it opened sharply, and the page whisked round to see what it was.

A face looked out, very peaked-looking and white, and nodded briskly at the bandages and the instruments; the two other men darted at those, seized them, ran up the stairs and vanished, leaving the door but a crack open behind them.

Then Mr. Chiffinch turned and stared at me again. He appeared very pale and agitated.

"Mr. Chiffinch," said I, "I will take no refusal at all. How is His Majesty?"

His lips worked a little, and I could see that he was thinking more of what was pa.s.sing in the chamber beyond than of my presence here.

"They are blooding him again," he said; and then--"What are you doing here?"

I took him by the lapel of his coat to make him attend to me; for his eyes were wandering back like a mule's, at every sound behind.

"See here," said I. "If His Majesty is ill, it is time to send for a priest. I tell you--"

"Priest!" snapped the page in a whisper. "What the devil--"

I shook him gently by his coat.

"Mr. Chiffinch; I will have the truth. Is the King dying?"

"No, he is not then!" he whispered angrily. "Hark--"

He tore himself free, darted back to the further door, and stood there, at the foot of the stairs, with his head lowered, listening. Even from where I was I could hear a gentle sort of sound as of moaning or very heavy breathing, and then a sharp whisper or two; and then the noise of something trickling into a basin. Presently all was quiet again; and the page lifted his head. I stood where I was; for I know how it is with men in a sudden anxiety: they will snap and snarl, and then all at once turn confidential. I was not disappointed.

After he had waited a moment or two he came towards me once more.

"Mr. Mallock," he whispered, "the King needs no priest. He is not so ill as that; and he is unconscious too at present."

"Tell me," I said.

Again he glanced behind him; but there was no further sound. He came a little nearer.

"His Majesty was taken with a fit soon after he awakened. Mr. King was here, by good fortune, and blooded him at once. Now they are blooding him again. Her Majesty hath been sent for."

"He is not dying? You will swear that to me?"

He nodded: and again he appeared to listen. I took him by his b.u.t.ton again.

"Mr. Chiffinch," said I, "you must attend to me. This is the very thing I have waited for. If there is any imminent danger you must send for a priest. You promise me that?"

He shook his head violently: so I tried another attack.

"Well," I said, "then you will allow me to remain here? Is the Duke come?"

"Not yet," said he. "Ailesbury is gone for him."

"Well--I may remain then?"

There came a knock on the inner side of the further door; and he tore himself free again. But I was after him, and seized him once more.

"I may remain?"

"Yes, yes," he snapped, "as you will! Let me go, sir." He whisked himself out of my hold, and went swiftly up the stairs and through the door, shutting it behind him, giving me but the smallest glimpse of a vast candle-lit room and men's heads all together and the curtains of a great bed near the door. But I was content: I had got my way.

As I walked up and down the antechamber, very softly, on tip-toe, it appeared to me that I was, as it were, two persons in one. On the one side there was the conviction and the determination that, come what would, I must get a priest to the King if he took a turn at all for the worse--since, for the present, I believed Mr. Chiffinch's word that His Majesty was not actually dying. (This was not at all what the physicians thought at that time; but I did not know that.) This conviction, I suppose, had always been with me that it was for this that in G.o.d's Providence I had been sent to England; at least, seven in the moment that I had left my house and run down the gallery, there it was, all full-formed and mature. As to how it was to be done I had no idea at all; yet that it would be done I had no doubt. On the other side, however, every faculty of observation that I had, was alert and tight-stretched. I remember the very pattern of the carpet I walked on; the pictures on the walls; and the carving on the presses. Above all I remember the little door in the corner of the chamber--the third; and how I opened it, and peeped down the winding staircase that led from it.

(I did not know then what part that little door and winding staircase was to play in my great design!) Now and again I looked out of the single window at the river beneath in the early morning suns.h.i.+ne; now I paced the floor again. It seemed to me that I had found a very pretty post of observation, as this appeared a very private little room, and that I should not be troubled here. The great anterooms, I knew, where the company would be, must lie on the further side of the bedchamber.

I suppose it would be about five minutes after Mr. Chiffinch had left me that Her Majesty came. The first I knew of it was a great murmur of voices and footsteps without the door. I went to the door and pulled it a little open so that I could see without being seen, and looked up the lobby beyond the King's chamber; for in that direction, I knew, lay Her Majesty's apartments. A couple of pages came first, very hastily, with rods; and then immediately after them Her Majesty herself, hurrying as fast as she could, scarce decently dressed, with a cloak flung over all, with a hood. Behind her came two or three of her ladies. I saw the poor woman's face very plain for a moment, since there was no one between me and her; and even at that distance I could see her miserable agitation; her brown face was all sallow and her mouth hung open. Then she whisked after the pages through the door into the great antechamber that lay beyond the bedroom. I went back again, to shut the door and listen at the other; for I knew that the King's bed was close to it (though he was not in it at this time, but still in the barber's chair where he had been blooded); and presently I heard the poor soul begin to wail aloud.

I heard voices too, as if soothing her, for all the physicians were there, and half a dozen others; but the wailing grew, as she saw, I suppose, in what condition His Majesty was--(for he still seemed all unconscious)--till she began to shriek. That was a terrible sound, for she laughed and sobbed too, all at once, in a kind of fit. I could hear the tone very plain through the door, though I could not hear what she said; and the voices of Mr. King and others who endeavoured to quiet her. Gradually the wailing and shrieking grew less as they forced her away and out again; till I heard it, as she went back again to her own apartments, die away in spasms. Poor soul indeed! she was nothing accounted of in that Court, yet she loved the King very dearly in spite of his neglect towards her. She could not even speak to him (I heard afterwards), though he had spoken her name and asked for her, after his first blooding.

Half an hour later--(in the meantime no one had come in to me, and I could only walk up and down and listen as well as I could)--I heard again the murmur of voices in the lobby, and steps coming swiftly down from the private closet. Again I was in time at the door to see who it was that went by; and it was the Duke of York, with my Lord Ailesbury who had gone to fetch him from St. James'. He went by me so near that I could hear his quick breathing from his run upstairs; and he had come in such a hurry that he had only one shoe on, and on the other foot a slipper. He went very near at a run up the lobby, and up a step or two, and into the great antechamber and so round to the Bedchamber; and I presently heard him enter it. Indeed I was very favourably placed for observing all that went on.

It was about eleven o'clock, as I suppose, when I first heard His Majesty's voice; and the relief of it to me was extraordinary.

I had ventured up the stair or two that led from this room into the Bedchamber, and had, very delicately, opened the door a crack so as to hear more plainly; but I dared not look through for fear that I should be seen.

For a long while I had heard nothing but whispers; and once the yapping of a little dog, very sharp and startling, but the noise was stifled almost immediately, and the dog, I suppose, taken out at the other door.

Once or twice too had come the sudden chiming of all the clocks that were in the Bedchamber.