“Your Majesty,” whispered Elvira, “do you know who that woman is?”

“I? No,” said the Queen.

“You did not catch the name. The King deliberately mispronounced it. It is Lady Castlemaine.”

Catherine felt waves of dizziness sweeping over her. She looked round at that watching assembly. She noted the smiles on their faces; they were regarding her as though she were a character in some obscene play.

So he had done this to her! He had brought Lady Castlemaine to her reception that she might unwittingly acknowledge his mistress before all these people.

It was too much to be borne. She turned her eyes to him, but he was not looking her way now; his head was bent; he seemed absorbed in what that woman was saying.

And there stood the creature—the most lovely woman Catherine had ever seen—yet her loveliness seemed to hold an evil kind of beauty, bold, brazen, yet magnificent; her auburn curls fell over bare shoulders, her green and gold gown was cut lower than all others, her emeralds and sparkling diamonds about her person. She was arrogant and insolent—the King’s triumphant mistress.

No! She could not endure it. Her heart felt as though it were really breaking; she suffered a violent physical pain as it leaped and pranced like a mad and frightened horse.

The blood was rushing to her head. It had started to gush from her nose. She saw it, splashing on to her gown; she heard the quick intake of breath as the company, watching her, gasped audibly.

Then she fell swooning to the floor.

The King was horrified to see Catherine in such a condition; he ordered that she be carried to her apartments, but when he realized that only the feelings of the moment—which he preferred to ascribe to anger—had reduced her to such a state, he allowed himself to be shocked by such lack of control.

He, so ready to seek an easy way out of a difficulty, so ready to accept what could not be avoided, felt his anger increasing against his wife. It seemed to him that it would have been so simple a matter to have received Barbara and feigned ignorance of her relationship with himself. That was what he himself would have done; that was what other Queens had done before her.

He knew that he must placate Barbara; he had promised to, and she would see that this was one of the promises he kept. He hated discord, so he decided that he would shift to Clarendon the responsibility of making Catherine see reason.

He sent for his Chancellor.

He was not so pleased with Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, as he had once been. In the days when he had been a wandering exile he had felt unsafe unless Clarendon was beside him to give him the benefit of his wisdom and advice. It was a little different now that he was a King. He and Clarendon had disagreed on several matters since their return to England; and Charles knew that Clarendon had more enemies in England than he ever had in exile.

Clarendon wished to go back to the prerevolutionary doctrine. He believed that the King should have sole power over the militia; and he wished to inaugurate in place of Parliament a powerful privy council who would decide all matters of state.

The King agreed with him on this but on very little else. Clarendon continually deplored the King’s wish to shape his own monarchy in the pattern of that of France. The King was too French in his outlook; he looked to his grandfather, Henri Quatre, as a model, not only in his numerous love affairs but in his schemes of government. Again and again Clarendon had pointed out that England was not France, and that the temperament of the two countries was totally different.

They also disagreed on religious matters. Clarendon thought Charles’ policy of toleration a mistaken one. There were many in the Court who sensed the mild but growing estrangement between the King and his most trusted minister, and they were ready enough to foster that growth. Buckingham was one, and with him in this was his kinswoman, Lady Castlemaine.

Clarendon, as a wise old man, knew that his enemies were watching, quietly as yet but hopefully.

Still he persisted in his frankness with the King; and although he had been against the Portuguese marriage he now attempted to take the side of the Queen.

“Your Majesty is guilty of cruelty towards the Queen,” he said; “you seek to force her to that with which flesh and blood cannot comply.”

Charles studied the man. He no longer completely trusted him. A few years ago he would have listened respectfully and he might have accepted Clarendon’s view; but he now believed that his Chancellor was not wholly sincere, and he looked for the reasons which had impelled him to take such views as he now expressed.

Charles knew that Clarendon hated Barbara. Was this the reason why he now urged the King not to give way to his mistress’s cruel desires, but to support his wife? How could he be sure?

“I have heard you say,” went on the Chancellor, “when you saw how King Louis forced his wife to receive his mistresses, that it was a piece of ill nature that you would not be guilty of, for if ever you had a mistress after you had a wife—which Your Majesty hoped you never would have—she should never come where your wife was.”

“It is good for a man who has a wife not to have a mistress,” said Charles testily, “but if he has, he has, and there’s an end of it. We would all like to be virtuous, but our natures drive us another way. I hold that when such a matter as this arises the best road from it is for good sense to be shown all round. If the Queen had quietly received my Lady Castlemaine there would not then be this trouble.”

“Your Majesty, I would beg you to please your wife in this, for she is the Queen and the other but your mistress. I can assure Your Majesty that Ormond and others agree with me in this. You should repudiate my Lady Castlemaine and never allow her to enter into your wife’s household.”

The King was rarely angry, but he was deeply so on this occasion. He remembered the hypocrisy of Clarendon when the Duke of York had married his daughter. Then he had said he would have rather seen Anne James’ mistress than his wife. It seemed at that time he had a little more respect for mistresses, since he was eager to see his daughter one.

No! He could trust none. Clarendon, Ormond, and the rest urged him to repudiate Barbara, not because she was his mistress, but because she was their enemy. They would have been howling for the destruction of the Queen if they did not think her an ineffectual puppet who could harm them not.

Then Charles fell into one of his rare moods of obstinacy.

He said: “I would beg of you all not to meddle in my affairs unless you are commanded to do so. If I find any of you guilty in this manner I will make you repent of it to the last moments of your lives. Pray hear what I have to say now. I am entered upon this matter, and I think it necessary to counsel you lest you should think by making stir enough you might divert me from my resolution. I am resolved to make my Lady Castlemaine of my wife’s bedchamber; and whosoever I find using any endeavors to hinder this resolution, I will be his enemy to the last moment of his life.”

Clarendon had never seen the King so stern, and he was shaken. He remembered all his enemies at Court, and how again and again when he was in danger from them it was the King who had come to his aid.

He hated Lady Castlemaine; he hated her not only because she was his enemy but because of the influence she had over the King. But he knew that in this instance, the King’s will being so firm, he must remember he was naught else but the King’s servant.

“Your Majesty has spoken,” he said. “I regret that I have expressed my opinions too freely. I am Your Majesty’s servant, to be used as you will. I beg you forgive the freedom of my manners, which freedom has grown out of my long affection for Your Majesty.”

The King, regretting his harshness almost immediately, laid his hand on Clarendon’s shoulder.

He gave a half-smile. “I am pledged to this. It’s a mighty unpleasant business. Come, my friend, extricate me; stand between me and these wrangling women. Be my good lieutenant as you have been so many times before, and let there never more be harsh words between us.”

There were tears in the older man’s eyes.

The charm of the King was as potent as it had ever been.

Oddly enough, thought Clarendon, though one believes him to be in the wrong, one desires above all things to serve him.

Clarendon made his way to the Queen’s apartment and asked for audience.

She received him in bed. She looked pale and quite exhausted after her upset, but she greeted him with a faint smile.

Clarendon intimated that his business with her was secret, and her women retired.

“Oh, my lord,” she cried, “you are one of the few friends I have in this country. You have come to help me, I know.”

“I hope so, Madam,” said Clarendon.

“I have been foolish. I have betrayed my feelings, and that is a bad thing to do; but my feelings were so hard to bear. My heart was broken.”

“I have come to give you my advice,” said the Chancellor, “and it is advice which may not please Your Majesty.”

“You must tell me exactly what you mean,” she said. “I can glean no help from you if you do not talk freely of my faults.”

“Your Majesty makes much of little. Has your education and knowledge of the world given you so little insight into the conduct of mankind that you should be so upset to witness it? I believe that your own country could give you as many—nay more—instances of these follies, than we can show you here in our cold climate.”