A Duet, with an Occasional ChorusDoyle, Arthur Conan
General
A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Married people -- Fiction
They had followed the guide into another small chapel, which bore the
name of Henry VII. upon the door. Surely they were great builders and
great designers in those days! Had stone been as pliable as wax it could
not have been twisted and curved into more exquisite spirals and curls,
so light, so delicate, so beautiful, twining and turning along the walls,
and drooping from the ceiling. Never did the hand of man construct
anything more elaborately ornate, nor the brain of man think out a design
more absolutely harmonious and lovely. In the centre, with all the pomp
of mediæval heraldry, starred and spangled with the Tudor badges, the two
bronze figures of Henry and his wife lay side by side upon their tomb.
The guide read out the quaint directions in the king’s will, by which
they were to be buried ‘with some respect to their Royal dignity, but
avoiding damnable pomp and outrageous superfluities!’ There was, as
Frank remarked, a fine touch of the hot Tudor blood in the adjectives.
One could guess where Henry the Eighth got his masterful temper. Yet it
was an ascetic and priest-like face which looked upwards from the tomb.
They passed the rifled tombs of Cromwell, Blake, and Ireton—the
despicable revenge of the men who did not dare to face them in the
field,—and they marked the grave of James the First, who erected no
monument to himself, and so justified in death the reputation for
philosophy which he had aimed at in his life. Then they inspected the
great tomb of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, as surprising and as
magnificent as his history, cast a glance at the covering of plucky
little George the Second, the last English king to lead his own army into
battle, and so onwards to see the corner of the Innocents, where rest the
slender bones of the poor children murdered in the Tower.
But now the guide had collected his little flock around him again, with
the air of one who has something which is not to be missed. ‘You will
stand upon the step to see the profile,’ said he, as he indicated a
female figure upon a tomb. ‘It is the great Queen Elizabeth.’
It was a profile and a face worth seeing—the face of a queen who was
worthy of her Shakespeares upon the land and her Drakes upon the sea.
Had the Spanish king seen her, he would have understood that she was not
safe to attack—this grim old lady with the eagle nose and the iron lips.
You could understand her grip upon her cash-box, you could explain her
harshness to her lovers, you could realise the confidence of her people,
you could read it all in that wonderful face.
‘She’s splendid,’ said Frank.
‘She’s terrible,’ said Maude.
‘Did I understand you to say, sir,’ asked the American, ‘that it was this
lady who beheaded the other lady, Queen of Scotland, whom we saw ’way
back in the other compartment?’
‘Yes, sir, she did.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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