“Speak,” said the queen.
“I will, when we are alone,” was the answer.
Anne of Austria looked at her attendants, who immediately withdrew. The Béguine, thereupon, advanced a few steps towards the queen, and bowed reverently before her. The queen gazed with increasing mistrust at this woman, who, in her turn, fixed a pair of brilliant eyes upon her, through her mask.
“The queen of France must, indeed, be very ill,” said Anne of Austria, “if it is known at the Béguinage of Bruges that she stands in need of being cured.”
“Your Majesty is not irremediably ill.”
“But tell me how you happen to know I am suffering?”
“Your Majesty has friends in Flanders.”
“Since these friends, then, sent you, mention their names.”
“Impossible, Madame, since Your Majesty’s memory has not been awakened by your heart.”
Anne of Austria looked up, endeavoring to discover through the mysterious mask, and this ambiguous language, the name of her companion, who expressed herself with such familiarity and freedom; then, suddenly, wearied by a curiosity which wounded every feeling of pride in her nature, she said, “You are ignorant, perhaps, that royal personages are never spoken to with the face masked.”
“Deign to excuse me, Madame,” replied the Béguine, humbly.
“I cannot excuse you. I may, possibly, forgive you, if you throw your mask aside.”
“I have made a vow, Madame, to attend and aid all afflicted and suffering persons, without ever permitting them to behold my face. I might have been able to administer some relief to your body and to your mind, too; but since Your Majesty forbids me, I will take my leave. Adieu, Madame, adieu!”
These words were uttered with a harmony of tone and respect of manner that disarmed the queen of all anger and suspicion, but did not remove her feeling of curiosity. “You are right,” she said; “it ill-becomes those who are suffering to reject the means of relief Heaven sends them. Speak, then; and may you, indeed, be able, as you assert, to administer relief to my body—”
“Let us first speak a little of the mind, if you please,” said the Béguine—“of the mind, which, I am sure, must also suffer.”
“My mind?”
“There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsations cannot be felt. Such cancers, Madame, leave the ivory whiteness of the skin unblemished, and putrefy not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient’s chest hears not, though he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding onward through the muscles, and the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely, even temporarily, to disarm the rage of these mortal scourges—their home is in the mind, which they corrupt—they gnaw the whole heart until it breaks. Such, Madame, are the cancers fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?”
Anne slowly raised her arm, dazzling in its perfect whiteness, and pure in its rounded outlines as it was in the time of her earlier days.
“The evils to which you allude,” she said, “are the condition of the lives of the high in rank upon earth, to whom Heaven has imparted mind. When those evils become too heavy to be borne, Heaven lightens their burdens by penitence and confession. Thus, only, we lay down our burden and the secrets that oppress us. But, forget not that the same gracious Heaven, in its mercy, apportions to their trials the strength of the feeble creatures of its hand; and my strength has enabled me to bear my burden. For the secrets of others, the silence of Heaven is more than sufficient; for my own secrets, that of my confessor is enough.”
“You are as courageous, Madame, I see, as ever, against your enemies. You do not acknowledge your confidence in your friends?”
“Queens have no friends; if you have nothing further to say to me—if you feel yourself inspired by Heaven as a prophetess—leave me, I pray, for I dread the future.”
“I should have supposed,” said the Béguine, resolutely, “that you would rather have dreaded the past.”
Hardly had these words escaped her lips, than the queen rose up proudly. “Speak,” she cried, in a short, imperious tone of voice; “explain yourself briefly, quickly, entirely; or, if not—”
“Nay, do not threaten me, Your Majesty,” said the Béguine, gently; “I came here to you full of compassion and respect. I came here on the part of a friend.”
“Prove that to me! Comfort, instead of irritating me.”
“Easily enough, and Your Majesty will see who is friendly to you. What misfortune has happened to Your Majesty during these three and twenty years past—”
“Serious misfortunes, indeed; have I not lost the king?”
“I speak not of misfortunes of that kind. I wish to ask you, if, since the birth of the king, any indiscretion on a friend’s part has caused Your Majesty the slightest serious anxiety, or distress?”
“I do not understand you,” replied the queen, clenching her teeth in order to conceal her emotion.
“I will make myself understood, then. Your Majesty remembers that the king was born on the 5th of September, 1638, at a quarter past eleven o’clock.”
“Yes,” stammered out the queen.
“At half-past twelve,” continued the Béguine, “the dauphin, who had been baptized by Monseigneur de Meaux in the king’s and your own presence, was acknowledged as the heir of the crown of France. The king then went to the chapel of the old Château de Saint-Germain, to hear the Te Deum chanted.”
“Quite true, quite true,” murmured the queen.
“Your Majesty’s conferment took place in the presence of Monsieur, His Majesty’s late uncle, of the princes, and of the ladies attached to the court. The king’s physician, Bouvard, and Honoré, the surgeon, were stationed
