PATRICIA
at the
INN

by
J. C. Snaith

Author of
Broke of Covenden

Illustrated by
H·B·Matthews

[iii]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Charles Stuart, of song and legend, subsequently the “Merry Monarch,” King Charles Second, is perhaps the most romantic figure in English history. Much has been said of him; little good, much evil; but at all events whatever his shortcomings and capitulations to the flesh, it cannot but be conceded that he is the focussing point for all the speculation and cogitation of the romanticist. He gave to history a chapter of sovereignty replete with debauchery and misrule. But there was occasional worthy reading between the lines; reading that conveyed friendship, faith, and loyalty.

The incidents of the following narrative, “Patricia at the Inn,” purport to deal with Charles Stuart’s adventures immediately subsequent to the historical battle of Worcester. It will be remembered that following the[iv] execution of the ill-fated Charles the First, the Prince of Wales was crowned by the Scottish people at Scone, January 1, 1651. Oliver Cromwell was not to be declared Lord Protector of the Commonwealth until almost two years later, but already he had stamped his inexorable will upon the nation. Prince Charlie backed by twenty thousand men marched upon Stirling, determined to enforce the sovereignty of the Stuart dynasty and by right of blood and sword to teach this upstart man of the people that sovereigns were born, not made, and that the memory of the “martyred king” should be vindicated in the person of the surviving Stuart. However, the redoubtable Cromwell wasted no time on vow-making, but with his usual energy placed himself in the rear of the Royalist army and cut it off from communication with Scotland. Prince Charlie was thus compelled to continue his march on England. He got as far as Worcester, where the mayor and certain unclassibles crowned him King Charles the Second. But on the same day Cromwell appeared for the coronation[v] festivities and a memorable battle ensued, lasting five hours. The Scots were decisively routed. Prince Charlie escaped, and after experiencing many vicissitudes and amazing adventures, extending over a period of some six weeks, finally succeeded in being smuggled aboard a waiting vessel and so won safely away to Normandy.

It was this period of outlawry, during which a price was set on the royal head of Charles Stuart and he was being hunted like a dangerous criminal, that Mr. Snaith has employed as the basic theme on which to graft a romance. In the main the narrative offers a striking instance of the predominant trait of the Stuart character—the sovereignty of the flesh to the exclusion of all else, even personal safety.

[1]

PATRICIA at the INN

CHAPTER I
The Man out of the Night

IT had been remarked that the weather was extreme for the time of year. The little inn, huddling on the desolate bridle-path that ran in front of the open sea, was wrapped in a cloud of fog; the night was as hollow as a crypt; of a temper to warp the spirit; and so silent, that when a wild fowl cried as it shivered by[2] the tide, a hundred echoes woke in the high rocks rising behind the tavern.

The house was on a wild and lonely coast. It stood on the road to nowhere, high hills and seas about it; and as not one traveller a month came to it from the landward, it was frankly for the service of that strange, furtive company of adventurers who came in the night from France and Holland when the winds were friendly.

All the bitter evening had the landlord kept the chimney-side. Flanked on the one hand by a fire of red faggots, hissing with blue flame; on the other by a stiff glass of hot rum-and-water, the old man sat, the image of bodily contentment.

He was not a prepossessing fellow. His face had all the cunning of his years. He had a pair of hard, colourless, averted eyes, divided by a hill of flesh, whose blue-veined prominence said where his profits went to; a close-kept mouth; and over and above it all a fixed expression of calculated greed, of sustained, unwavering rapacity. It was not a good countenance[3] to look upon. But to-night it was as near benignity as it could ever be. For while he sat with the warm fire and the generous waters inflaming his ruddy jowl, his mind and person were never so composed. It made him purr internally, like the cat nestling in the cinders, to compare his own fortunate condition with that of those frozen men upon the sea. While he reproduced, and even enhanced, in his imagination the discomforts and the perils they endured, he thanked the god of his physical well-being for the happy chance that had saved him from being a mariner. He called upon the serving-maid to brew a stronger posset for her master’s constitution.

“Cold as the bowels o’ the ground,” he groaned in his fleshly happiness. “And b’aint it sing’lar how the frost crawls round me. Ugh, it’s in my toes now, and now it’s in my blood; and, Lord, I feels a little iceberg a-creepin’ down my spine! Zakes! if it were not for a drop o’ stingo I might be very poorly.”

[4]“Keep them dogs hot,” said the landlord, when the girl came with the fresh concoction. “Keep the faggots crackling. The night’s a stinger, isn’t she? Lord! I wouldn’t like to be upon the sea.”

He fell to tracing weird shapes in the fire, and presently to dreams of pleasant things. Suddenly he started from his doze, and called out to his son:

“Joseph, d’ye hear me? Put them shutters up, and drop the bolt across. There’ll be no comp’ny, so ye and Cicely can both get bed’ards. ’Tis a night to freeze a dog.”

But even as the landlord spoke, his judgment was shown to be for once at fault. For as his son opened the door and let in a few gusts of frost and sea-fog, a man was found upon the threshold. He was the first of all the unexpected visitors who came to the “Sea Rover” that wintry evening; he made the first among those strange incidents that were so soon to invade the peace of the landlord’s life.

The man from the night pushed Joseph[5] aside, and lumbered into the shadows of the room. He proved to be a seafaring man, in a dogskin cap, with a pair of large earrings in his ears. Like the landlord, his visage bore no superficial graces. The rime glistened on every inch of him; and his tawny face, tanned by the winds and the seas, showed fiercely from out of it. There was only one eye to his countenance, but that shone on the landlord like a beacon; there was an oath on his lips; and he came to the fire and put his hands to the blaze, with an air of mastery that startled the drowsy host even more than his appearance. This was hardly a friendly smuggler here in the ordinary course of trade.

While the mariner melted the rime on his jerkin and thawed his frozen limbs, Master Gamaliel Hooker shook up his wits and asked what his pleasure was.

He drew up a settle opposite the landlord’s stool and flung himself on to it. Then it was, in the full light of the candles, that the weather-beaten ugliness of the man was revealed.[6] Violence had closed his right eye forever; a scar ran from his temple to his under-jaw; and in contradistinction to the greed, the subtlety, and the cunning of the host, there was a brutal insolence about the fellow that had a whimsicality in it too, as is sometimes to be observed in those indomitable characters who, conscious of their qualities, presume upon them. Master Hooker, distrustful by nature as he was, had already discovered this sinister audacity, and while that in itself was enough to unsettle the peace of his mind, it was the fact that a naked knife was gleaming under his visitor’s jerkin that most contributed to his discomposure.

For a time the landlord and the mariner sat watching one another. On the one side was a contemptuous carelessness; on the other a measure of suspicion amounting to hatred. But the landlord deemed it wiser to conceal his emotions under an appearance of friendliness. He proffered a pipe of tobacco to the mariner.

“You’re almighty kind, mate,” said the[7] sailor, accepting a clay pipe from the mantelpiece and pressing in the contents of Gamaliel’s box.

It was the beginning of conversation. The landlord was eager to discover the particular business that had carried his visitor to the “Sea Rover,” of all the places in the world, at that hour and on such a night. Had he a cargo for disposal; was he waiting for his ship; was he running from the law; or had he come to cut the throats of himself, his son, and Cicely, and afterwards to despoil the inn? Certainly a more ill-favoured pirate he never saw.

The sailor, rather silent at first and ill-disposed to communicate his designs, gradually thawed into talk under the benign influences of hospitality. He even went to the length of revealing the business that had carried him so strangely there.

“You don’t happen, mate,” says he, with a leer,—“you don’t happen to ’a’ seen a young man wandering about this here coast, do you?”

[8]He had seen no young man whatever. He would certainly have remarked the smallest detail of his appearance, had he done so; for the first of all Gamaliel Hooker’s characteristics was his inveterate curiosity. It was this which led him to push a topic that otherwise would have had no interest for him.

“Well, mate,” says the mariner, “he ain’t very easy to describe, d’ye see. I’ve got to set eyes on him myself yet.”

The sailor hesitated an instant, while he gazed keenly at the host. He seemed to be calculating how far he could safely take Gamaliel Hooker into his affairs.

“Gentle enough,” he said, reluctantly. “But he’d come unattended, I daresay; and he mought be drest like the commonalty.”

“But how can I tell you whether I’ve seen[9] him or not,” said the cunning Gamaliel, “unless I know the kind o’ young man he is?”

“Who said ye had!” he cried. “Did I say ye had, you rum-peddling lubber?”

“Well, you didn’t then,” said the landlord, with a soft smile, “but I thought you did.”

The sailor turned his ugly face full on the landlord’s. He looked him over steadily and fiercely. He then put down his pipe, spread out the palm of one hand, and tapped upon it with two fingers of the other to lend an emphasis to what he was about to say. And he chose his words with a most particular and deliberate care.

“Now look you here, mate,” said he, “I[10] know the sort you are. I’ve not followed the sea and run cargoes on this coast for twenty year without getting a wind as to the repitation of Gamaliel Hooker. I know the kind o’ man you are, my hearty. But I’m just going to sing a word in your ear. I’m a plain-dealing man, I am: rough, you’ll say, almighty rough; but I’m a man o’ my word, and you can lay to that. Now, if a young man comes to your lousy, rat-ridden old hulk of a tavern, and asks for Diggory Fargus, you just have the goodness to tell him he’ll find me showing a light from the boat, at twelve o’clock at midnight, a short sea-mile up the shore at Pyler’s Cove. You just tell him that. And if he should come, you are to keep him snug, d’ye see, here in this house till nightfall. He must not be seen by a living soul. Do this, my hearty, and you may have such a reward one day as will go beyond your dreams. But you just play me false, mate; you just send the young man to the wrong place, or set it abroad that he’s at your tavern, and as surely as Diggory Fargus hath followed the sea for twenty years, he will[11] twist your head off your body with these two hands.”

To the deliberation of the seaman’s words was added a fierceness of countenance that made the landlord quail. Gamaliel grew terrified. He was fascinated by that unpleasant face. When Diggory Fargus pointed his threat by expanding his great gnarled brown paws, sweat sprang out of the landlord’s hair. When his eyes fell on the knife that gleamed at the seaman’s waist, he was held in the paralysis of fear. And, in the height of his sufferings, the mariner bestowed a kind of dramatic poignance upon them, by laughing aloud at poor Gamaliel’s fat, pale face; by striding to the door, flinging it wide, and disappearing into the wintry darkness.

[12]

CHAPTER II
The quest of the King

IT was not easy for the landlord to recover of his terror. Your rogue is a nervous creature. How often does he anticipate his doom! When the wind sighs through the branches, he hears the creakings of the gallows tree. Long after his visitor’s departure, Gamaliel felt two strong hands upon his throat. Why he should have been[13] so conscious of them it is not easy to know. He had certainly done nothing as yet to provoke the wrath of Diggory Fargus. He had not so much as encountered the mysterious youth, let alone betray him. Perchance the innkeeper had no command of his own integrity. He may have distrusted himself. Perchance he had that grim insight into his own character that could foresee his instincts leading him into a course of action that he knew to be fraught with peril. A man who all his life long had first sought his own pecuniary advantage in any circumstance that might arise, did well to fear that his rapacity in any given case might get the better of his judgment.

As Gamaliel Hooker sat cossetting himself beside the fire, this mysterious young man of the mariner’s dwelt much in his mind. A proscribed cavalier, he would stake his leg. Diggory Fargus lay with his boat in the Cove, waiting to take him out of England over the sea. As likely as not this fugitive was a person of consideration and great place, such was the mariner’s solicitude for his well-being. If[14] that were the case, Parliament would know how to reward him who stayed his flight. Doubtless a specific reward was already upon his head. If Fortune directed him to the “Sea Rover,” Master Hooker shrewdly foresaw that he might have to choose between his greed and his personal safety. But there was a phrase also of the sailor’s that he would do well not to forget. He had hinted at a recompense that might exceed the dreams of his avarice. Plainly this fugitive was a person to be welcomed.

With one hand clasping the liquor-cup, the landlord presently fell into a doze. Even in this state of semi-consciousness, the unknown young man still ran much in his mind. Once the sleeper started up and thought he heard his knock upon the door. It was but a coal that had fallen on the hearth. He looked into the fire and saw his picture there. A very handsome, proud young man, with curls on his shoulders and great diamonds glistening on his hands. But farther back in the bright embers was the face of the ugly sailor glowering[15] behind it, with his earrings, his knife, and his strong two hands.

Suddenly the landlord jumped up from his stool with a little cry. He ran to the window and pressed his ear against the drawn shutters. The silence of the wintry night had been invaded by strange sounds. At first they were so remote that their nature was hardly to be distinguished. But presently they grew plain. Horses!

Hoofs were on the frosty road. The music of iron upon adamant rang nearer at every clock-tick. They were coming to the inn. What could it mean? Gamaliel was not expecting visitors to-night. Yet stay, he was! Was there not this young man of the sailor’s? Again Gamaliel put his ear to the shutter, to withdraw it suddenly, however, with a spasm of fear.

It was not one horse alone on the road; rather a company. He had heard the rattle of sword and breast-piece; besides, the regulated manner of approach told the nervous landlord that the law had come to his inn at last. For[16] years he had expected it. But now it was at his threshold, God knew he was in no case to greet it. Could it be that his misdemeanours, stealthy and hidden as they were, had been uncovered, and that now he was to be called on to pay the penalty!

For a minute the landlord faltered. He surrendered his mind to fear. Again the sweat burst out of him; it glistened on his white cheeks; he could not restrain the convulsive twitch of his old, irresolute hands. It was for only a minute, however. Gamaliel’s mind recurred to the fugitive of the mariner’s, and once more he became himself. Of course, these on-coming soldiers were seeking that mysterious youth. What a fool he was to be frightened so easily!

In the comfort of this thought Master Gamaliel wiped the sweat from his face, drained his glass, and made ready to receive his unwelcome visitors grandly. He opened his portals, even before they knocked upon them; and, standing in the full light of the fire and the candles as it met the darkness and the sea-fog,[17] he inquired their pleasure with a bow and his hand on his heart.

Through the driving mists of the night, steaming horses, and cold, rime-coated men clad in morions and corselets of steel, were visible. The foremost of these soldiers sprang from his steed briskly and strode past the landlord into the warm kitchen of the inn. He was a nimble, ruddy little fellow, with a human look to his countenance, and, for all the cold night, a cheerful way with him.

“Landlord,” said he, clapping his wet form to the face of the fire, “you see us highly in need of your kindness. Brew us your hottest posset in your biggest bowl, and waste no time upon it. We have come far, but we have further to go by many a weary mile, unless our fortune is kinder than it promises.”

“Yes, yes, Captain, to be sure,” said the landlord; “you shall drink of the best of my poor hostelry, and that right speedily.”

Master Hooker, his fears allayed by the frank good humour of the soldier’s demeanour, became the pattern of a host. He called his[18] son and his serving-maid to procure the liquor and boil the pot; and he himself fussed so much about the details of the brew, that in a surprisingly few minutes the soldier and his nine cold men were entertained. The little man, under the benignant influences of the warmth and liquor, became disposed for intercourse. With his back to the fire, he communicated things that the landlord wanted mightily to hear.

A battle had been fought by Worcester City between the arms of Oliver, Protector, and Charles Stuart, King of Scots. The Lord, it seemed, had vouchsafed “a crowning mercy” unto the former ones, to such a degree, forsooth, that those of the latter had been beaten incontinently from the field. And Charles Stuart was even now being hunted mile by mile over the West Country; that almost every hour he was likely to be ta’en; and that whosoever had that good fortune would have a goodly recompense, so considerable a price there was upon his head.

“A considerable price is on his head!” cried[19] the landlord, scalding his mouth in his excitement, “and he is in these parts even now!”

“True i’ faith,” said the soldier, “or I’d be snug in Hounslow Camp. We hold an information that he lies in hiding on this shore, and on some night such as this he will try to make the coast of France. But it will be a darkish evening when he goes, I fancy, there being so many of us prick-ears along this beach, d’ye see.”

“Well, I reckon, friend,” Gamaliel said with deep emotion, “that if Charles Stuart, king or no king, comes to the ‘Sea Rover,’ you can lay to it he will not go off again so freely as he came. A considerable reward, I think ye said, sir?”

“And while your mind’s upon it,” said the soldier, “look to the proscribed. There’ll be lords and cavaliers, as well as kings, awaiting a wind for France. We shall tarry on this shore until we hold the Stuart; so if lace shirts and velvet breeches come your way, just you keep them, Master, and send us word along[20] the coast. I’ll answer for it that you shan’t be a loser by it.”

Gamaliel Hooker might be said to drink these phrases, so agreeable were they to his receptive ears. He had a particular talent for the devious and the underhand. And the prospect of turning an unexpected penny, and at the same time winning the approbation of the law, tickled his mind so tenderly, that he could not repress a beam of pleasure that crept out of his crafty eyes.

The soldier drained the bowl. Cheek by jowl, they sat together beside the blaze. Outside the awaiting troopers stamped their feet, beat their arms, and damned the cold with a Scriptural directness. But the host was thoughtful to the last degree. He caused his son to bear hot meal and water to the rime-clad horses, while the servant-maid took mulled sack and spiced October to their riders. And when at last they went forth again to scour the bitter night for a hunted solitary, mine host stood[21] bareheaded by his door waving a candle to them until they passed from sight into the blackness of the rocks. Thereon the good Gamaliel, mirror of hospitality, soul of ancient cheer, closed his portals with a crash, slipped bolt and chain across, and returned to his wassail. For a whole minute he puckered his wits with some tough arithmetic, and then said to his son:

“I reckon, Joseph, I’m nineteen shillings and fivepence out on this visit up to now. But I’m not complaining; for I rather think, my son, since things are as they are, we shall have that money back before the week’s spent, with maybe a few groats emolument over and above.”

The landlord chuckled at the thought, and began to build his castles. Soon his son and the servant-maid went to their repose; but Gamaliel sat for long enough about the fire, staring into its ever-changing caverns and abysses—now sipping his liquor, now lost in meditation, now revolving choice schemes in his mind. Indeed, so happy was he in these circumstances,[22] that it seemed better far to pass the night before the cheerful hearth in the society of his cups than with ice-cold sheets about him, and rats scuttling behind the wainscot of his chamber.

Thus he sat for many an hour, thinking and dozing and dreaming. He was wonderfully at peace to-night with the world and his own soul. True, he occasionally saw the sinister eye of the mariner gleaming out of the bars; once, too, he saw his knife flash through the shadows when the candles had waned into gloom. But even these chimeras had not the power to quell the ineffable satisfaction that was gradually invading the old man’s heart. A vista of delightful possibilities had been revealed by recent history; there was money to be made. Should good fortune preside over his affairs, he had a chance to earn more in a week by dabbling in political matters than he would in a lifetime by regular, straightforward trade.

“Not so straightforward neither,” he confided to his cup. “Oh, ye’re a cunning one, Gamaliel, my son! Now, Master Charles[23] Stuart, King o’ Scotland, please to knock upon my door. I am sure your Highness will be more than welcome. There’s a cheerful hearth awaiting for you—ay, and a tun o’ liquor for your royal lips. I am sure, my liege, the good Gamaliel will entertain you as befits a prince. And, oh, Lord! to think the price o’ your blessed Majesty would buy that poor old man an annuity for the remainder of his days. And, prithee, bring your followers also, my liege—all in their nice new velvet breeches and point-lace frilly-dillies. Gamaliel shall find a lodgment for them too, good your Majesty, an he beds his own humble carcase with the cows.”

And so he dozed again. He dreamt that the King had come at last, and was knocking at his door. He dreamt that the King was entering—a most courtly, handsome gentleman, all graciousness and dignity; a wonderful white feather in his hat, secured by a clasp of solid silver; his sword-hilt wrought in gold and precious stones. It was all most singularly real. How, although only a simple country[24] innkeeper, he had some little breeding, and strove to show it to the King; how he received him on one knee, and did not speak a word until his Majesty had spoken, as he heard they did at courts; and how the King said, “Rise, my honest fellow—’tis not your congees that I need, but your hospitality,” with just that smiling dignity that comes by nature to a prince. What a gracious gentleman he was! Had he not the modest self-effacement of good breeding, but withal the air and habit of command? Did it not make his old blood thrill to hear his gentle, noble tones? It was a dream; he knew it was indeed a dream, yet it was all very real and dazzling and grand.

And then the good Gamaliel dreamt that a heavy bag of gold was jingling in his hands. It was the fee the soldiers had paid him for the just delivery of the person of this splendid prince. Ugh! and then there was the sailor. He saw again the visage of that grim mariner, with the fierce eye, the earrings, the knife, the scar—the whole concentrated ugliness. And then there came the most vivid dream of all.[25] The sailor’s lips parted in a hiss of malevolence, the knife flashed from his belt, and the old man felt it buried in his flesh. The knife seemed to burn him like a fire, so that he awoke with half a curse and half a scream.

Master Gamaliel did not marvel that his vision had such a terrible reality. A live faggot had fallen from the fire and lay smouldering on his foot. He shook it off with an oath of pain. But even in the act, a diversion came to startle him out of his sufferings.

There came a sound in the night. He lifted his ears like a startled fox. His nerves were in a plague of a twitter. For a man so old, he was in a ridiculous taking. Once more he clapt his head to the shutter. Yes; no; yes—horses again!

Could it be that the King was coming? Could he actually be coming in his own person, in the dead of the night, to the “Sea Rover”? Was the landlord awake, or was it a figment of his dreams?

Yes, horses undoubtedly, and the dead of night indeed. Was it not the season at which[26] the King was most likely to arrive? Ay, and the place. After all, why should not the King, in his present circumstances, come to his inn? Nothing could be more natural, more expected. A presentiment, every second growing into a conviction, possessed the landlord. It seemed to send his heart beating against his brain.

[27]

CHAPTER III
The strange Visitors that came to the Sea Rover

HE continued keenly to listen. The horses appeared to be approaching but slowly. They seemed to be two. The King and one of his many faithful followers, perchance, wearied to death and very cold. It was a pity the fire had fallen so low on the hearth. It was unfortunate, too, that the landlord should have so[28] short an intimation of the royal coming. But he must contrive to give Charles Stuart some sort of a reception, because all the world over a king is still a king; and whatever one’s politics, should royalty honour one’s roof-tree, it is impossible to assert them. Therefore he called up the stairs in his greatest voice:

“Joseph, come down at once. Cicely, my wench, do you come too. The King is arriving!”

Soon the travellers were heard hard by the window, under the sign. The landlord, excited as he was, yet hung back a little from opening the door. He would let them knock, just as though they were common persons; he would pretend that he did not know one was the King.

It seemed an intolerable time ere a demand was made for their admittance. At last came the expected knock, but, strangely enough, a very gentle one. There was nothing regal in it. It had no authority, no command; it was modest to the point of timidity. If it were not[29] the King after all! Had he not better make sure!

“Who be ye?” Gamaliel demanded, with his mouth to the door. “Who be ye? What d’ye want?”

If it really was the King, he was not supposed to be aware of the fact; and much as his pulse might leap at addressing a prince in this audacious manner, he loved to do it none the less.

The landlord recoiled with an oath. It was the voice of a woman. His disappointment was bitter; a woman when he had looked for a prince!

Again he put his questions, this time angrily. What could a woman want at his inn on that inaccessible, inhospitable shore at that hour of the night? He met with the same[30] reply, but this time there seemed a deeper fervour in it.

Gamaliel was so angry at his disillusion, that his first thought was to refuse admittance to these travellers. But then in a flash there came a second thought. They were refugees, of course. How foolish of him not to have surmised that. They might not be royal personages, yet might they not have their value too?

The next moment he had unbarred the door. Sure enough, a woman was on the threshold. She was masked and cloaked like one who had journeyed far: the white rime was heavy on her garments and her hair; and she looked more dead than alive with the piercing cold. Her hands shook visibly as one held her horse’s rein, and the other gathered up her riding-coat.

He smirked and bowed as humbly as he could. He was not ill pleased by the appearance of the woman. It was sad indeed, but there was that in her bearing that plainly said she was a person of condition.

[31]“I beseech you to succour us,” she said, with great entreaty. “My husband is stricken sore, and so spent with traveling that he must die to-night out in the cold if you do not help us.”

“God forbid!” said the landlord, piously. He liked the sweetness and the candour of her bearing. His curiosity was stimulated by it too. She thanked him with a grave simplicity, and went forth to her companion. The landlord followed with his assistance. He could dimly discern by the candle-light coming through the open door a second horse, sorely distressed by an infinite journeying. There was little to be seen of its rider beyond a shrunk, cloaked figure, huddling low to the saddle.

“My poor lad,” said the woman, staggering to his side, “there is a roof and a fire for you at last.”

She gave him her shoulder. The rider swayed towards it, and leaned so heavily upon her that Gamaliel, bustling forward with his aid, marvelled that he did not bear her to the ground.

[32]“Don’t let ’em touch me,” the rider said in a whisper of querulous anguish. “Tell ’em to keep off.”

Amid a few groans and a few curses, the unhappy traveller was half led, half borne within on the shoulder of his wife.

“Oh, the poor gentleman!” exclaimed the servant-maid, setting the best chair near the fire and placing a soft pillow upon it. She then ran to procure an armful of fresh logs, while Joseph took the horses to the stable. The stricken man was put by the hearth, and his wife, distressed and fatigued as she was, tended him with an unremitting diligence. She took off his hat, wet cloak and gloves, and then knelt down before him to chafe his cold hands with her own even colder, and talked to him as she did so in little soothing affectionate phrases, as a mother might to a child.

Meantime the landlord was busy indeed. He hobbled about the kitchen with his gout as though the hour was three at noon instead of three of the night—now for a cup, now for a spoon, now for a stoup of the hissing liquor,[33] steaming and vapouring in the bowl. Mine host had brewed a posset, strong, hot, searching, fit for a prince! Ha! and who knew that royal lips were not about to imbibe it. The thought was ever present in Master Hooker’s heart. Be very sure his eye was never an instant from his guests.

The lady, it is true, still wore her vizard, thereby balking his curiosity in the main particular; in her tender solicitude for her lord, she had forgot to doff her dripping cloak; she was bedraggled, weary, unkempt, chilled to the blood; but were she presently to be revealed a princess, the shrewd Gamaliel would be able to say without impropriety that from the first he had guessed so much. He knew high breeding when he saw it; he flattered himself that naught could conceal it from him. He had not seen a feature, a jewel; she had hardly given him three words; his knowledge of her attire was confined to a hood, a riding-cloak, and a mask; but there it was, the hallmark, the indescribable strange grace that misfortune could not tarnish, nor distresses hide.

[34]As for the man, her husband with the querulous eyes and the countenance twisted with pain, there was not a button of his coat that the landlord had not already by heart. A most handsome fellow, in the very heyday of his youth. Yet he looked so pale and worn, that it seemed as if the first puff of wind might extinguish the life of him, as it would a candle-flame. He had a singular delicacy of feature, designed for sweetness and urbanity. But his face was robbed of something of its peculiar beauty by an expression of peevish arrogance, aggravated perhaps by his imminent condition, but probably sufficient at any time to mar a countenance wonderfully fair. A high spirit seemed to preside behind it, a chafing, impatient, overleaping spirit, that hated being harnessed to a maimed body. And below the resentful anguish of the young man’s face was a permanent look of weariness and disillusion that one might expect to see in that of a person who had drunk the cup of life to the very dregs until his lips revolted from its bitterness. Yet the landlord, whose scrutiny missed not a detail,[35] could see that he was of the quality of his veiled companion. He was one accustomed to the service and the homage of his fellows; one who would not be slow to exact it, either. Still his exquisite fair curls clustering round his neck, and his blue eyes, if their insolence, their anger, and their pain could be forgotten, lent him the appearance of an angel—a soiled, ruffled, complaining angel, who, finding itself on earth, wished to be elsewhere.

His condition was certainly dire. He could hardly speak; and as he lay back on his pillow, sobbing for breath after each effort to do so, his impatient rage would have been ludicrous had it not been a thing to pity. The woman continued to chafe his hands till a little warmth crept in them, then rose from her knees to procure and arrange more cushions for him. Presently, the landlord came with the steaming tankard. The lady took one sip of it carefully, to assure herself that it was not too hot for the lips of her companion. She held it for him while he applied his mouth. He withdrew it instantly, with a splutter.

[36]“God scald you, landlord!” he said, in a hoarse, weak voice, “you have burnt my mouth.”

“There—there, mine own,” said the lady, caressing his curls. “Drink freely. It will not hurt you, indeed; nay, it will give you ease.”

Having settled the sufferer in some degree of comfort, she asked the landlord to lead her to the stable.

“No, no, Patsy woman,” said the stricken man, “you must not leave me. You will not leave me, will you, Patsy?”

“I will not be five minutes away,” she answered, soothingly. “But I cannot neglect the poor, good horses, can I, mine own? You would have them lie in comfort and warmth, even as you do.”

“Prithee, stay you here, madam,” said the honest serving-girl. “And take off your wet cloak, and come about the fire. I will look to the horses.”

“No, child,” said the lady; “I must look to[37] them myself. They have played a noble part this night.”

Despite the entreaties of the sufferer, whose demands for his wife not to leave him rose almost to a wail, she insisted on going out to see that Joseph had succoured the distressed creatures according to their deserts.

“I’m a-going to take them wet clothes off you, madam, by your leave,” she said. “You will surely get your death. Why, even now you look fit almost for the grave.”

The landlord pricked his ears up. Gazing at her, he observed that at last the blood had come[38] to her pale cheeks. His own pulse quickened, too. And he smiled to note how her attempt at secrecy galled her. Even with a strip of black velvet across her eyes, her face was as easy to read as a printed page. She was a simple creature, whose instincts betrayed her.

Very soon the stricken man was conveyed to the chamber that had been set for his reception. It had little to recommend it, to be sure, yet it was the best and most spacious the “Sea Rover” could boast. It had not been used for years; and when a fire was kindled in the unwilling chimney, a colony of sheltering birds were grievously perturbed.

However, Cicely the serving-maid was a bustling soul with a warm and capacious heart, into which the poor guests had been already admitted. She had aired the sheets by the kitchen fire, dusted the apartment, and adjusted the bed and its furniture, all by the time the unhappy gentleman was got up the stairs.

The landlord came at the tail of the procession. He wore a sagacious gravity. He said:

[39]“If I can give ye a finger of assistance, madam, I shall be more than happy.”

“My husband can only suffer me about him,” said the lady. “But you are very kind.”

“And what might be his malady, if I may be so bold, ma’am?” the landlord asked.

“And what might they call it, ma’am,” said the soft Gamaliel. His voice had the most persuasive humility.

The landlord was much too astute to pursue the theme. He apologised for the poverty of the chamber, but it was the best he could place at their disposal. It was a lonesome inn, they must know, not in the least designed for the honour of gentry. But he would not have them conclude for the world—Master Gamaliel coughed in a most deprecatory manner—that, country person as he might be, he was ignorant of what was the due of people of quality. Assuring them of his humble duty and of his[40] desire to promote their comfort in every way, he hoped they had blankets enough, and if they had not, would they kindly inform Cicely the serving-maid? Thereon he gave them “Good-night,” and hobbled downstairs, so deep in his thoughts that he collided with a warming-pan filled with hot brands that was being carried upstairs by the assiduous Cicely. The landlord gave a howl of pain as it shrivelled the back of his hand.

“Should mind where ye be goin’ then,” said the servant-maid, with grim satisfaction.

“Wish it had been his eyes, the slimy old twöad,” she muttered under her breath piously.

[41]

CHAPTER IV
Will Jackson

THE landlord sat long over his matutinal collops and ale. No philosopher could have desired nicer food for meditation than the incidents of the night. The thoughts they induced were subtle, yet peculiar. Could it be that the young man with “the incurable disease” was the King! He himself did not know his Majesty other[42] than by repute. He was said to be young and handsome. He was said to be on the coast of Dorset; and last night he was expected at the “Sea Rover” by persons of knowledge and experience. Could this querulous young gentleman be the King, after all? He was building that theory up piece by piece in his mind. He could see no argument against it other than the fact that he had a woman for a travelling companion. True, she might be a fugitive, even as he. That she was a person of a rare condition he did not doubt. It would not surprise him to discover that she was a princess of the royal house.

Still, whatever the nature of his suspicions, he must hasten to confirm them. The bird might slip through his fingers else. The simplest and the surest way was to send for the soldiers. Thereby he would guard against risk. But Gamaliel never was a friend of simplicity. Besides, his guests might prove not to be royalty at all. They might be merely a pair of proscribed aristocrats. In that case, he would lose two wealthy patrons on the first day of[43] their sojourn; a thing not in the least consonant with his ideas. In the case of the King, that would be all well and good. There would be a fine reward for his pains. But in the matter of a cavalier, there was no such great solatium. They were not rated so high; indeed, they might be said to be as common as dirt. No; in a bald phrase, as between a man and his conscience, he proposed in the case of a mere cavalier seeking refuge under his roof, to bleed him, to wring him dry, and then to propitiate the law at the eleventh hour by depositing the fellow, and the few rags left to cover him, into the hands of the Lord Protector.

Was there not an intelligent discretion in a scheme of this kind? But he must be wary indeed. It might prove a dangerous game. Once more that menacing sailor put a thrill of fear in his heart; he was sure that the young man upstairs was he whom Diggory Fargus sought. But, be that as it may, there was one piece of information he must acquire at all costs: Was this young man Charles Stuart?

He had yet to view his visitors by the light of[44] day. He conceived the idea of bearing food to them with his own hands, particularly as now it was nine o’clock of the morning, and they had evinced no disposition to procure it for themselves. When the meat was ready, he took it upstairs and tapped upon the chamber door. But if Master Hooker had hoped to gain admission there, his disappointment must have proved extreme; for at his knock the door was opened, and the lady met him on the threshold. She stood unmasked at last, her eyes now shining in the morning light. There was a finger on her lip.

“Hush, sir!” she whispered. “I prithee do not speak, and do not enter. My husband sleeps, and he is in such case that I fear he may never wake again.”

Speaking thus, she took the tray of meat from the landlord’s hand, and she acted with such a quickness that the door was shut upon him ere he could reply. He heard the key turn in the lock. So far he was foiled. Plainly they had something to conceal, and just as[45] plainly they did not trust Gamaliel. Yet the old man went downstairs with positive knowledge on a point that was not the least important. He had seen the lady’s face. Her mask was off, and he had fed his cunning eyes on her every feature. He was not by any means a young man, and he whimsically thanked his stars that his blood was cool and sober.

What a creature! A woman formed for tenderness and passion. He had seen them younger and more lyrical, handsomer, more brilliant, more prodigal of smiles; for there was the matron in her shape, and he should take her age for thirty-five. But she had the sort of face that Correggio painted: large, steadfast eyes, gazing on the world and occasionally mocking at it gently, as one who has sipped the cup of the poison of experience, and who has had the native strength to accept the bitter draught without being defiled—nay, rather fortified. A fair and gracious lady, then, with a face sensitive and pure, grave with the loveliness of knowledge; no milk-hearted nymph nor dimpled Hebe, but a Helen at the zenith of her[46] womanhood, who “moves a goddess and looks a queen”; true child of her sex withal, one who could be an angel to her friends and a devil to her enemies.

“Ha, I’ve seen her!” said Master Hooker to his son. “She’s a picter, she is, Joseph, and belongs to the nobility. On that I’ll take my Biblical! Wonderful fair hands she ’ave, white as surf; and harkee, Joseph, diamonds a-shining on ’em.”

The landlord communicated this final phrase with his mouth close to Joseph’s ear.

“And I’m thinking,” he continued, “that even if they don’t happen to be royalty, they may requite us. Ye can lay to it, they’ve got some blunt about ’em, somewhere. Now, Joseph, I’m going to find out who they are.”

“If they are proscribed, I shall first suck ’em dry like an egg, d’ye see, and then I shall break ’em like the empty shell.”

[47]The son shuddered. He had no opinion in these things one way or another, but his was not the rapacity that could grind its heel into the face of a dying man.

All that day the landlord’s doubts were unresolved. He was not once allowed within the chamber. Despite his frequent approaches with food and questions as pretexts for the satisfaction of his curiosity, the entrance was ever sedulously kept. True, he would be greeted at once by the lady’s courteous appearance, but every time her form would intervene between him and the interior of the room; and there would always be her chin and mouth shot out in a long-drawn “Hush!” and worlds of entreaty in her eyes.

The evening found the landlord no nearer to the truth. He was growing desperate. It was imperative that he should know something of his guests.

Three times that day had he asked the lady for her name and that of her companion, and three times had he been put off by the tender tact that only a woman has. Again he sat[48] before the fire with the hot liquor, and the candles, and the hissing logs about him, with the door and shutters fast against the wintry night. He sat coiled in thought. There were little knots of it upon his brow; it crouched and ruminated in his eyes; it crept round his wizened lips; his very hands were clenched upon it.

He had weighed every pro and con in his cunning heart. If it were the King who lay upstairs, it would be to his advantage to deliver him up to his enemies at once. He could afford to do so, for there was a great reward. Besides, as was known to all the world, delays were dangerous, especially in the case of kings. Assuming that they honoured your abode, were they not here to-day and gone to-morrow? And should their coming be by night, in stealth, was not their going likely to be also of that manner? Assuming this mysterious young man to be the King, this “incurable disease” of his was doubtless a blind, intended to mask his real intentions. Any morning might find him flown. Yes; if this young man[49] really was the King, he must deliver him up immediately.

If he were not the King, however? If, as was very likely, instead of Charles Stuart, he proved to be only some fugitive cavalier from Worcester fight, he could not afford to denounce him at present. There was no such great solatium in regard to a cavalier. He must first bleed him to his very last fourpenny ere he allowed him out of his custody. The whole scheme was finely matured in his mind; would that he could be at peace in regard to the stranger’s identity! He would then know which course to follow.

He was still excogitating the hard matter, and forever twisting and turning it over, when, even as the night before, a stranger knocked on the door, and obtruded himself within the inn kitchen.

This time the visitor was humble enough. He was a tall, loose, shambling fellow, so discoloured by dirt and an outdoor life that he was as brown as a berry. His hat was low over his eyes; he wore a stained and torn pair of[50] breeches, made of leather, and a jerkin of the same character. He had the appearance of a hedger and ditcher, or a woodman beset by adversity. The first words he uttered confirmed this impression.

“Are you wanting a serving-man or a drawer, good master?” he said, seating himself on a stool opposite the landlord.

The worthy Gamaliel regarded him keenly and suspiciously. The fellow looked an idle vagabond enough. Yet his swarthy countenance was not altogether destitute of a certain intelligence. He had a pair of keen, observing, humorous eyes to his face; there was a certain impudence and audacity about them which was sufficient to redeem their owner from the commonplace. The landlord, himself no mean observer, and a penetrating judge of his fellows, was rather interested by him. It was not usual to find a man of this type who merited looking at twice.

“And even if I do, sirrah?” asked Gamaliel, taking up his visitor’s question, after scrutinising him from head to heel.

[51]“Well, master, if you do,” said the fellow, readily, “you would be acting a charity by giving a poor man a chance to serve you.”

“I do not doubt it,” said the landlord. “But if your looks be a true credential, I may live to rue the day. Upon my life, I never saw a countenance I like so little. If my eyes do not deceive me, I take ye to be a rogue of the first magnitude; a villain that I should fear to turn my back upon.”

The fellow laughed. Perchance it was well he did so. For in his laugh there was something frank and human. His lowering face grew vastly more engaging; and the landlord set the candour of it to his favour.

“Ah! master,” he said, “you are very hard upon a poor wight who knows not where to turn for a meal in these troublous times. I pray you, have a little pity for one who hath been accustomed to fill his belly, and to sleep in comfort and security.”

“Nay, master, there you wrong me,” said[52] the vagrant. “Few have followed a more reputable course than I.”

The landlord looked at him piercingly. After all, his mind might be a little better than his appearance. His speech was hardly so rustic as one would expect.

“What hath been your station in life?” asked Gamaliel. “And what hath brought you to this pass?”

“It is but a few weeks since I was serving-man to my Lord Wilmot,” said the other, hesitatingly.

“’Twas a stroke of evil fortune, master. My lord was too good a friend to poor King Charles Stuart. He is now fleeing o’er hill and dale for his life, with devil a serving-man to attend him.”

The landlord listened greedily. In a flash a very bright idea illuminated his mind.

“Have I!” laughed Lord Wilmot’s servitor.[53] “Why, master, I am more familiar with King Charles than I am with my own mother. He and my lord were hand in glove together. Many’s the time I have filled the King’s cup, and listened to his voice. There never was so jovial and kind a gentleman. Why, master, he hath even spoken to me by my name.”

“Then, of course, sirrah,” said he, “you would recognise this Charles Stuart at once if you saw him?”

“Why, master,” said the fellow, “I know him as well as I know the nose on my face.”

That was enough for the landlord. He engaged him at once in the dual capacity of drawer and ostler. And so excited was the good Gamaliel, that he forgot or overrode the accumulated instincts of a lifetime. He did not even attempt to beat him down a farthing in the matter of wages. For was it not a truly providential thing, that on that of all nights, in that of all seasons, a man should walk into his kitchen who would be able so readily to[54] resolve his difficulties? He might have searched the breadth of Dorset, and yet have not discovered a person capable of giving an opinion on the identity of Charles Stuart. Fortune was on his side indeed.

No sooner had the details of his employment been agreed upon, and this somewhat uncouth-looking serving-man had passed into the hands of a new master, than the landlord in a moment of unwonted generosity bade his son fetch the fellow half a pint of small ale.

“Now sit ye here, my lad,” said Gamaliel, “and let me hear about this Charles Stuart. But I think we might get on better if first I had your name.”

“My name is William Jackson,” said the serving-man, “but they call me Will for short.”

“Will Jackson, is it?” said the landlord. “Humph! I think as little of the name as I do of the bearer. But for the present we will let that pass. Now tell me of this Charles Stuart. What kind of a person might you call him?”

[55]“Oh, master, a grand man indeed!” said Will Jackson, with a fine air of enthusiasm. “A rare noble gentleman.”

“Humph!” said Gamaliel, “I have my doubts about it—the Popish dog! But what doth he look like?”

“A wonderful handsome fellow, master,” the earnest William said. “Every woman that he looks upon just languishes for love of him, they say.”

“Can you recall his features at all?” the landlord asked. “Is he a black man or a light man? A tall man or a small man? Come, trim your memory.”

“Well, do you know, master,” said Will Jackson, with a sly laugh,—“do you know, master, they do say that his gracious Majesty is most remarkable like me. I’ve heard say that we’re as like as two peas, master, and that we might be brothers, as it were.”

“Confound the rogue!” cried the landlord, laughing, in spite of himself, at the fellow’s impudence. “A pretty sort of likeness you’d be, I reckon, to discover a king by! I suppose,[56] you ragged, dirty scoundrel, that some wench hath caressed your self-esteem with this fair parallel to coax an extra groat or two. A mighty fine king you’d make, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, master, if you please, more than one wench hath told me so,” said Will Jackson.

His master shook his fist at him, and threatened to cuff his ear. But the fellow in his own mind seemed so certain that he bore a striking resemblance to the King, that he appeared quite unable to divine the source of Gamaliel’s mirth. For the landlord fell to laughing until he nearly wept over the perplexed gravity of his drawer. Whatever the intolerable impudence of the assumption, Will Jackson certainly appeared not to regard it in the light of a jest. To him it seemed rather a circumstance from which he extracted a highly legitimate pride.

Even as the landlord talked with his servitor he made up his mind that he would lose no time in making the utmost possible use of Will Jackson’s special knowledge. He must see the[57] young man with the incurable disease at once. But how could it be contrived? That matter was not so easy. It seemed hopeless to gain access to a domain guarded by so fair a Cerberus. After much hard thinking, Master Gamaliel had recourse to a stratagem—an extreme one, it is true, but highly necessary in this present pass.

Rising from his comfortable posture by the fire with a reluctance that made the act heroic, the landlord went forth to the stable, and bade Will Jackson follow him. He procured a ladder there. He had it borne without, and, under cover of the darkness, reared it with caution against the sill of the window of his guests. Drawn shutters guarded the window; but, as Gamaliel was well aware, they lacked some two inches of the top of the casement. A thread of candle-light shone through the chink. The work of a spy was therefore not likely to be difficult.

Ordering Will Jackson to hold his peace and also at the same time to hold the ladder, the eager old landlord, infirm as he was, first[58] climbed to the top himself to discover how the land lay. No night-thief could have been more astutely skilful. It is true he scaled the ladder in a gingerly manner, but never a sound did he make. Planting his feet firmly on the highest rung but one, he cocked his cunning eyes over the top of the shutter, and was rewarded by a clear view of the chamber, and the unhappy persons there immured.

It was a piece of good fortune that the bed was facing the window. The landlord was the better able to regard its occupant. He was half prepared to discover that the young man was the victim of no malady whatsoever. He would not be surprised to find him quite hale and hearty. Nay, so little faith had he in this young man’s condition, that should he prove to have left the chamber secretly already, and gone away in stealth, he was not likely to be astounded. It so befell, however, that the landlord had no grounds for his suspicions. For there confronting him the sufferer lay. By the mellow light of the candles he saw him prone in the bed, as ghastly as death. He was[59] wide awake, but lay with glazed eyes and a face convulsed with agony. The woman was binding a cloth steeped in water about his forehead.

In spite of the night’s bitterness, the landlord had so intense an interest in that which was passing before his eyes, that he betrayed no desire to leave his perch for the present. Looking down upon these unconscious persons from his high situation, he felt fairly secure from discovery. And was it not exhilarating to see without being seen! He must contrive to hear too. A chance phrase might reveal their identity.

Thus, notwithstanding that poor Will Jackson was shivering in the cold below, the landlord took his jackknife from his pocket and began to whittle away a piece of the wooden window frame. Already rotten with decay, it yielded readily to the silent deftness that was brought to bear upon it.

There was soon a hole big enough for Gamaliel’s ear. At once he could detect the gasps and low groans of the man in the bed. And[60] he heard the woman say, in her soft low tones that thrilled to the heart like music:

“We can delay no longer, mine own; it must be done. Canst thou not trust me?”

The man clung to her outstretched hand, and drew his head away from her, like a child that is shy, farther back into the pillows. His pale lips were seen to move, but any words they framed the landlord could not hear. Thereafter for a time he lay with closed eyes, pallid and helpless, whilst the woman knelt down by his side and buried her beautiful head in the coverlet of the bed.

Presently she rose as one quickened by a sudden resolution. Tears she had not, but her eyes were filled with an anguish deeper even than the man’s. She crossed the room to where a broad settle stood with a tumbled heap of clothing upon it. The landlord observed, with a desperate dismay, that two cocked pistols lay there, whilst beside them was a case of embroidered leather. The lady opened this, and drew therefrom a dagger with a delicate point.

[61]Concealing this in her hand, perchance that the man might not see it, she approached the bed again. The landlord felt his limbs totter and begin to fail him, whilst his straining eyes seemed inclined to start from his head. What, in the name of the fiend, was the woman about to do?

The man in the bed turned his eyes up to her; they had the look of a wounded animal.

“Can it not stay?” he said, and his hoarse tone penetrated to the listener’s ears. “It can make no difference now; the game is played.”

A sudden rush of tears appeared in the eyes of the woman; but the masterful quivering of her lips said clearly that she refused to admit them to be there.

“Another day of this,” she said, “and all is over. Our only chance is to take it out before another hour goes by.”

“Ay, and if you cut it out,” the sufferer gasped, “I am done with if ever man was.”

“Nay, child; I will not have you say that,” she said, caressing his face with her unoccupied hand. The sweet imperious sorrow of her tone[62] touched even the listener at the window, who, after all, was not a man of stone.

Again the sufferer turned his face up to the woman and regarded her with the same dumb, dog-like look. She averted her gaze suddenly, as though she had not the fortitude to look at him.

“Canst thou not trust me?” she said again. “I will be, oh! so gentle. And we dare not have a surgeon—dare we, child? Indeed, we dare not tarry. Thou art in a fever even now, and every hour it rises. It must be done now, mine own, or thou wilt not see to-morrow.”

She spoke so wistfully that she might be beseeching her obdurate lord to gratify some feminine whim. He continued to regard her sickly and faintly, till at last a wan laugh crept upon his lips. It was the herald to the last desperate flicker of his courage—the courage that enables a man to look the mob in the eyes as he lays his neck on the block deliberately, delicately, and proudly. A fuller tone came into his hoarse, querulous voice. There was no longer complaint and petulance. The pettiness[63] had gone out of it; it was almost a companion for the woman’s own.

“As you will,” he said, and he came as near to achieving a careless laugh as a man in his extreme condition ever could. “In with the knife, then, butcher. Thou art aching to carve me up, I can see. Well, well; it were better that you had your way, for I suppose you’ll give me no peace till you’ve done it. But plague take you! You’re tenacious devils, you women. Your damnable iteration would wear away stone. You know the place, and it’s embedded in the thick of my back, I think. Now, mind you cut deep enough. Oh, but I say, good Mistress Surgeon, prithee, where be thy basin?”

By the time the victim had mentioned these among other details of the torture he was about to undergo, the eavesdropper on the ladder had seen and heard rather more than enough for his personal comfort. Therefore, he quitted his station on the top rung but one, and descended to the ground as speedily as he could, lest he should involuntarily become the horrified witness[64] of the knife at its work. When he came down to Will Jackson, he was shaking as one with the ague.

“I shall not want ye to go up to-night, my lad,” he stuttered; “to-morrow will do. Now, take away the ladder. You careless varlet, did I not tell you to make no sound?”

The clumsy fellow had had the misfortune to hit the top of the ladder against the nose of “The Sea Rover,” scowling in crude colours from the signboard of the inn. He appeared, not inappropriately it must be confessed, the most ill-favoured pirate that ever twirled a sword.

[65]

CHAPTER V
Shows the inconveniences that may sometimes attend an active mind

THE landlord went indoors to his accustomed fireside chair. He was chilled to the blood; every infirmity that lurked in the gross bulk of him was up in arms against his late impudence; and worse, his nerves seemed all tattered and torn in his brain. He had been privileged to see and hear a little too much. Ha! they were already at it,[66] curse them! The moans of the poor wretch upstairs were penetrating to his ears. Or were they the moans of the sea, sounds he had heard every night these forty years? Now and then he thought he heard a muffled, desperate cry. After all, it might be only the wild fowl on the rocks. How he wished he could rid his imagination of the scene that was being enacted. Would that he had not struggled up the ladder at all! Lord! were they never going to have done? It was enough to make a man revolt against his clay.

At this acute moment, however, Cicely appeared with her master’s nightly potation. It soothed his qualms somewhat. Pah! he had got the nerves of a girl. It was merely a little blood-letting; quite an everyday matter.

Curse the fellow, there were his cries again! What must it be like to have a bullet dug, inch by inch, by a dagger out of one’s own back! Ugh! what a morbid old fool he was; why must he forever keep thinking of it, and receiving the steel in his own pampered flesh?[67] Might it not be there in earnest if he ever went up a ladder again!

After all, however, when he came to think of the thing in its true relation, he was by no means sorry he had been there. He had acquired knowledge of some value. The “incurable disease” was neither more nor less than a bullet wound in the body. Now, why should the woman lie about it and conceal it from the world if the man, her husband, had come by it honestly? Had he been on the side of the just, in other words on that of the party in power, more explicitly, my Lord Cromwell and his Parliament, that wound would have been an honourable scar. They were plainly Royalists; persons of mark, no doubt, for were there not a thousand and one subtle but unmistakable evidences of their condition? And, just as plainly, were they not fleeing the country? Otherwise they would not come at dead of night to the “Sea Rover.”

He was afraid he must dismiss the theory of this young man being the King from his mind. It was almost certain that had Charles Stuart[68] been wounded to death, the fact would have been known over the length and breadth of the land. For him to have escaped so far in that dire condition would have been impossible.

Again, there was evidence in their familiar talk, despite something of a disparity in years, the woman being clearly older than her companion, that they were man and wife. In any case, the woman’s mode of address, tender and solicitous as it was, was hardly the one she would employ, even if she were a princess of the blood, to the King’s majesty. No; he was afraid he must look elsewhere for the King. Yet he had no need to be cast down upon the matter. These two persons were not to be despised. Their appearance suggested money and jewels. And they seemed to be delivered, bound hand and foot as it were, into his hands. Gamaliel hugged himself at that thought. They should be made to pay a price for that cold in his head. They should not aggravate his gout and his rheumatism, and set his nerves in a twitter, for nothing. He smiled malevolently[69] as he sipped his hot cup, and spread his hands out to the fire.

Perchance the poor devil was dying, though. Certainly no human spirit could ever be tottering nearer to the brink than that of the man upstairs. The idea awoke never a spark of pity in the landlord. He simply regarded the near prospect of his death as another factor in the case. If he were not the King, he was not sure that he did prefer him to die. There would be only a woman to deal with them. In the phrase of that malignant sailor, Diggory Fargus, he would trust himself to tear the heart out of a woman with his own two hands. But why at every twist and turn did that uncomfortable mariner obtrude himself? He cursed himself for having called him to mind. If, however, the young man was the King—in spite of everything the landlord still clung tenaciously to that hope,—it would not be to his interest for his Majesty to perish. He must be delivered up alive, if possible.

During the rest of that evening, Gamaliel was too shaken to spy again on his guests, or[70] to connive at others doing so. For he was still determined that his new drawer, whom he had engaged for that particular purpose, should go up the ladder also, and finally settle this hard problem as to whether Charles Stuart was actually at his inn or not.

It was not until the following evening that he summoned the courage to make a fresh attempt to set his mind at rest. During the day he could not venture to do so, for the publicity of light was too great. In the meantime he had not an idea of what had happened upstairs. He was still denied the chamber as sedulously as ever. He had tapped on the chamber door during the morning; the pale-eyed lady had appeared, more beautiful and more beset with anguish than before. She had taken a bowl of milk and a loaf of bread from the landlord’s hands, but beyond a word of thanks and a prayer that he should not again disturb the sleeper, he had nothing of her conversation. It was on his lips to inquire of the young man’s condition; but ere he could frame the question the door was swiftly yet silently closed upon[71] him, and for that day his chance had passed. As time wore on, a conviction grew up in his mind that the man was dead. The silence upstairs was so extreme; besides, an intangible sense of foreboding seemed to invade and presently possess, not only the atmosphere of the dismal old inn, but the minds of those dwelling in it.

Cicely went about in tears. The tender-hearted wench was sure something terrible had happened to the poor young gentleman. Her master swore at her, but he could not relieve his own mind of her fears. Joseph, his son, was also afraid: it was true that he and the serving-maid were singularly often in sympathy, more often than Gamaliel cared about. He would have got rid of her long ago, were she not such an industrious, capable girl. Then, again, a shadow seemed to hang over the mind, or what there was of it, of his new drawer. He had hardly spoken a word, and every task he was set to, whether it was cutting faggots or washing the floor, he performed in a perfunctory and absent manner. Indeed,[72] the first day he spent in the service of his new master was not to the satisfaction of the landlord. A more idle, more incapable fellow, he vowed he had never beheld. He would take the first chance of getting rid of him when he had served his turn. Twice during the day he had had to kick him up from the straw in the stable, where he had discovered him fast asleep.

At last, when the darkness had come again, the landlord once more resolved to allay his doubts. His nausea of the night before was merged in his overmastering curiosity. Summoning Will Jackson, he again had recourse to the ladder; and being at the mercy of his passions, he again had the temerity first to ascend himself.

No sooner, however, were his feet on the ladder, than a latent sense of horror was quickened within him. The bitter winter evening biting his ears, the moans of the sea, the gloom, the insecurity of hanging by one’s icy fingers in mid-air, all came upon him as a special reminiscence, and reproduced his pangs of the night before. And no sooner had he cocked[73] his eyes over the shutter than they were greeted by a face as pallid as the sheets in which it lay. The man was asleep. Many evidences of pain had vanished from his countenance; indeed, his slumber looked as natural as it was profound. Then it began to dawn on the landlord that this was the peace of death. The sweat broke out on the watcher’s face. Why, in the fiend’s name, had he ventured up that ladder a second time, when there was a loathsome, ugly corpse at the top to greet him!

So if this was the King, the King was dead. Poor young man! he had died under the knife, perchance. But why had he been so unthoughtful as to die at the “Sea Rover”? There would, doubtless, be no end of a business presently. Yet, more probably, it was not the King at all; in that case there would only be a woman to deal with, for fugitives must be made to pay for the privilege of perishing in that respectable house. Just, however, as Master Gamaliel’s thoughts had travelled back to their customary sphere, and were beginning to revolve in their natural orbit—namely and to[74] wit, the personal interests of Gamaliel Hooker—a phenomenon occurred to the corpse. It raised its arms and stretched itself.

The landlord bit his lips with anger. What a zany he was, to be sure; he had come to his dotage. To think that he should have mistaken a sleeping man for a corpse! It did not occur to him, cunning as he was, that it calls for as full-blooded a creature to be an eminent scoundrel, as it does for one to be distinguished in the more civil sciences. He could not shake off that sinister incident of the night before; he was a bag of nerves; he could hear skeletons creaking in the wind. With the best will in the world, there was hardly enough blood and pulse about him for this business. He had a thought too much imagination. He made but a poor second-rate sort of rascal, after all.

All this time, though the lady was in the chamber, she had been so still that the landlord had not noticed her. Turning his attention to her now, the eavesdropper saw that she was standing hard by the bed. She was no longer regarding the sleeper, however. Her head was[75] bent over something she held in her hand; and her tears were falling fast and thick. In the very frenzy of her companion’s sufferings she had restrained them; but now, when she had procured him some little surcease, her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere, and her infinite compassion extended to another.

Craning to the window and alternately pressing his ears and his eyes to the wood, Gamaliel was able to discover the object of her pity. The thing in her hand was an open locket. It was suspended by a chain of fine gold round her neck, and was worn apparently in the recesses of her bosom. The landlord was presently able to discern that it was a portrait in miniature. Yet it was far too small and delicately wrought for its outlines to be distinguished at that distance. Gamaliel had not to speculate long on its subject, however. For on a sudden impulse the lady pressed it to her lips with a passionate gesture, crying aloud in her throbbing tones:

The landlord, deeming that there was nothing further to gain by remaining longer in his precarious and grievously exposed situation, crept down from his perch, and sent up the shivering Will Jackson in his stead. It would require but a glance for the fellow to discover whether the man in the bed was or was not Charles Stuart.

Now, whether it was that Will Jackson had not the address of his master in the delicate art of seeing without being seen, or whether the fellow had had the audacity to advise wantonly those within the chamber of his presence, the landlord was in no case to tell; but certain it is Master Hooker heard a strange, wild cry arise from the room: and the next instant the serving-man came pellmell down the ladder, very much after the manner of one who has confronted a ghost.

The landlord hurriedly bore away the ladder and went indoors with his man, lest the lady above should fling back the shutters and discover[77] in what manner she had been spied upon. For it was plain that Jackson had had the folly to let her see his face at the window. Having abused his servant in the roundest terms for his incaution, the landlord proceeded to question him as to what he had seen.

So much for the slender hope the landlord had been secretly cherishing! He could not confess to any surprise, for many circumstances pointed against it. And as there was no sort of hesitation about the fellow, Gamaliel had no temptation to doubt him. Yet if it were not Charles Stuart, Jackson’s demeanour at the window clearly showed that he and the persons in the chamber were well acquainted.

“Then if it was not Charles Stuart,” the landlord demanded, “who was it, sirrah?”

“You are lying to me,” said the landlord, furiously; “and if you lie to me, you rogue, I[78] will break your head—or no, I will not; I will send for those soldiers that were here two nights agone, and I will deliver you up to them as a malignant who was concerned in Worcester fight. Now, who are they? D’ye hear me? Who are they, I say?”

“I say ye do know, sir!” the landlord cried. “And ye shall speak the truth, d’ye hear me! Why should you come down the ladder in that plight if ye had never seen these persons before?”

The fellow stood silent. The landlord repeated the question and heightened the threat. But it was of no avail. The drawer abided by his denial, simply and tenaciously. His master fell into a violent rage. He shook him by the collar, he kicked him, he beat him with his fists; but all he could get out of him was the same unwavering, stolid answer.

And at last, Gamaliel’s anger having spent itself somewhat and his disappointment having grown a little less keen, he grew to believe the[79] unfortunate Jackson. There was that in his humble, thick-witted rusticity that in itself killed suspicion. After all, it was not unlikely that the nervousness begotten by his strange employment, and his horror at being discovered in it, was the true cause of his wild appearance and behaviour.

As the landlord sat that evening, as usual, by his cheerful fire, examining the knowledge he had lately gained, and weighing it in his mind for what it was worth, he felt that he had no cause to be dissatisfied. The man and the woman upstairs in his best taffety chamber fronting the sea were certainly Royalists. And one of them, and he the man, was stricken and helpless; and were there not diamonds on the fair hands of them both?

[80]

CHAPTER VI
The night: the Sea: the Rocks:

IT was a rather late hour when the landlord went to bed that night. As was usual with him on the cold nights of the autumn and winter time, he found it hard to tear himself away from the cosy warmth of the fireside and his generous potations. Midnight had long gone when he rose from his chair, tried the kitchen door according[81] to his inveterate custom, and then stumbled up the creaking stairs to the icy sheets of his chamber.

Perchance they clapped too cold about his ancient blood for sleep to visit him; or likelier, he had an indigestion of the mind from excess of things to think about, for close his eyes as often and firmly as he might, or insinuate his fat person in every fantastic posture in the cold recesses of his bed, sleep was banished from him utterly. Those nerves of his still twittered in his old head. The events that had recently come within his ken were telling upon him. He could not grapple with them with the ease and deftness of a younger man, or a man endowed with stronger fibres in his character.

Do as he would, there was no sleep for him to-night. When he shut his eyes he saw the King with rime on his fine cloak, and rings on his fingers, and a feather in his hat, and a retinue of noble-looking gentlemen bowing low before him. When he opened them, the ugly visage of Diggory Fargus, that dreadful[82] mariner, was grinning at him from the foot of the four-poster. His image was quite as realistic as the King’s. How those earrings bobbed about in his ears! Twice when he was dozing off a convulsive twitch shot through his limbs, and he was compelled to draw his breath cautiously, for he felt a knife to be buried to the hilt in his back.

Suddenly he withdrew his ears from a coil of sheets, and twisted his nightcapped head half across the bed in a strained attitude of listening.

When the sound had first assailed him, he thought it was a rat scratching through a wainscot. But now there was the muffled grunt of a key revolving in a lock; and then a distinct, timid patter of footsteps. The chamber in which he lay was next to that of the lady; she was leaving her room at last.

She was probably only descending to the buttery to procure some necessary for her stricken companion. Or could it be that she was making her escape from the inn? Certainly her movements were cloaked in caution[83] itself. He could hear her stealthy feet on the creaking stairs. Less than a minute afterwards he sprang from his couch with an oath; he could hear her unbarring the outer door.

The bitter darkness was a fierce enemy to the old man, but not even it could daunt his curiosity. With many groans he swiftly grappled with his breeches, dragged on his vest and doublet, and wriggled his cold toes into hose and leather. The night bit him keenly, but he was determined that this woman should not be allowed to pass out of his house, in the dead of the night, with impunity. The landlord was sure she could not be going forth thus with an innocent intention. And in any case, his curiosity apart, he was the last man in the world to neglect a chance of obtaining a weapon against her.

In the midst of these brief speculations he found himself downstairs in the kitchen, protecting an unsteady candle with his hand. A sudden rush of air extinguished it. He was left entirely in the dark, with no precise knowledge of his bearings. He struck a course, however,[84] for the kitchen door, and found it, as he expected, open wide.

On entering the night, his face and hands were stung with the icy kisses of the falling sleet; little waves of it were running down the wind; the sea was crying with loud and many voices; and the hour seemed perishingly desolate and cold. The landlord peered up the path leading to the shore, and saw, many yards away, with the starlight playing round it, a wind-blown figure, whose bent head and flapping cloak were fighting hard against the blast. It was a woman struggling to the sands, and the thing that made her form the more conspicuous was a lantern that she bore. It picked her out in a prominence of light, and made a mark of her for the landlord’s eyes.

Crossing the road, the innkeeper came within the shadows of the rocks. Crouching in them, he dogged her step by step to the open sea. She was not long upon her road. She strode forth through the very teeth of the gale, straightly and confidently, either as one well-broken to adventure with no mind to shrink[85] from this, or, as the landlord more shrewdly preferred to think, as one by nature timid—himself, for example—who, being involved in a course of a highly daunting character, was compelled to act in a manner of frenzied eagerness, or not at all.

The landlord, panting after her in stealth, found his breath quite insufficient for the wicked wind, and, too, his head became the prey of neuralgic pains. He had never been so nearly a hero in his life as his curiosity, his cunning, and rapacity made him now. Presently a sheer and narrow cleft appeared between the rocks. The woman walked along, and a minute afterwards her gaze was strained upon the sea. She approached to the extreme verge of the waters, so that her feet were wetted with the tide. She held her hand across her brows to shield them against the darkness and the driving sleet; and that her eyes might cleave the boiling waste before her.

Nothing could she see, however, except the sea whining and straining from the wind and snow, and casting up its giant belly to the stars[86] like some impotent god of emptiness and fury frothing its threats against the universe. Again her eyes embraced this chaos, but only a lightship could she see swaying many a mile away; the light upon it seemed to hang above a chasm on the very margin of the world.

The night had now pierced her to the blood, while the upthrown surf had stung her face so bitterly that she could support its devilries no more. The landlord, in his wisdom, had not advanced beyond the shelter of the rocks; but the lantern that the woman bore was much his friend, and now at last the tardy moon showed signs of bursting through the wrack that forever raced across it. To him the lady’s movements were therefore made excellently plain; their very visibility, however, did but render her motives the more obscure. After a little while the landlord saw her turn her back upon the black waste of roaring winds and waters, and retrace her steps near to where he crouched encumbered in shingle and rank grass. He crept the closer into secrecy, so that presently she walked so closely past him that in her unconsciousness[87] the hem of her cloak nearly brushed his feet.

By the time the woman had gone some yards beyond him, the landlord got upon his legs and followed her with the same precaution as before. To his bewilderment, and untold annoyance too, instead of pressing directly back upon the path leading to the inn, as he had calculated that she would, she began swiftly to ascend one of the beetling faces of the rocks. The landlord put the stern question to himself whether he should attempt to follow her. The rocks, as he was well aware, were at this point of no particular height, nor were they very difficult or steep. But even in broad daylight they called for an effort from a man in years ambitious to ascend them. Curiosity, however, had its tentacles upon the landlord’s soul; it insensibly drew him panting, groaning, and stumbling up the cliff in the wake of the woman, even as he debated the matter in his mind. The god of circumstance was stronger than he.

The landlord tore his hands on the sharp[88] fragments that studded the face of the rocks; he tripped over others that lay concealed. He barked his shins, tore his clothes, bruised his body; but where the woman with the lantern went, he went to. In the teeth of the gale she won her way up to the pinnacle. The uncertain flame in the lantern blinked and tottered in her hand; but, like its bearer, it somehow prevailed intrepidly against the gale. Once more her eyes were for the sea; and as they confronted it even more steadfastly than before, the moon suddenly swam forth from a black patch of storm, and painted the tense lines of her form in a weird grey ghostliness. It even fell upon her face, and betrayed it wilder and more sombre than the night itself.

Still this grim moon and the few sardonic stars that revealed the woman’s face and form so clearly, mocked the groping blind-eyed rogue who, lying in a new concealment, strove to profit by their aid. They showed him all, yet showed him nothing. He could see her precariously poised under the awful sky, confronting the more awful sea. He could see the[89] very flesh of her quiver in the wind; he could hear her garments flapping in the blast; and as once she raised her lantern a fortunate angle to the moon, he saw the pale tears shine upon her cheeks. All this: yet how much did he know! To the sensual landlord it was symbolical of nothing; of nothing beyond the elements lurking in his own base intelligence. To him the woman was indubitably mad or drunk or criminal. He clenched his frozen hands upon the thought. Body of God! she should be made to pay a price for exposing his sacred person to the night and the tempest in this manner. He would have his two clotted hands upon her. He would tear every jewel, every rag off her mad body; he would tear out the very heart of her for this; and then she and that precious husband of hers should be delivered over to the gibbet; and they should swing in the wind o’ nights such as these, forever.

There was unction in these thoughts to the bruised and beaten landlord, now spying full-length upon his belly behind a boulder. But either these ideas or a particular phrase recalled[90] Diggory Fargus to his mind. How he loathed the image of that mariner! Could it be possible that this woman was searching for him? Indeed, what more likely? He doubtless had some wretched smuggler lying in some little cove on the beach; lying in readiness to take fugitive cavaliers by night into France. Could it be that she was waving that lantern as a signal to Diggory Fargus?

Already the landlord’s mind was at work on that new phase of the night’s mystery; already, despite the extreme bodily discomfort in which he was, he fell to tracing its bearing on his own private interests, as was his invariable wont, under every conceivable condition. His mind did not follow that trend very long, however. For while the woman stood with the moon and the stars, the wind and the spray beating upon her, a second figure sprang silently and mysteriously out of the night.

It appeared so suddenly upon the platform of rock on which the woman stood at gaze, that the astonished landlord could not tell how it had come there. It had evidently climbed up[91] from the other side, however, and, strangely enough, the woman seemed neither to be aware of its apparition nor to expect it; for even when the figure was less than ten yards behind her, her back was towards it, and she still looked out to the sea.

After the landlord’s first shock of excitement and surprise was over, he was quite prepared to recognise the form of Diggory Fargus in this unexpected vision. But one keen look at it, as it struggled and stumbled through the fierce wind, showed it to be too tall for that stunted mariner. The landlord heaved a sigh of vast relief.

It was not until the man, for man it clearly was, had come directly behind the absorbed woman, and plucked her by the cloak, that she withdrew her eyes from the sea and confronted him. And her manner of doing so was so wild and startled, that she could have had no cognisance of his presence. A cry escaped her lips; a cry so great that it pierced through the gale to the landlord’s ears; and it appeared to the watcher’s astonished eyes that had the man[92] not supported her in his arms, she might have fallen headforemost down the cliff. And then a little moment afterwards occurred a thing more singular.

The woman sank on her knees on the rock before this strange appearance; and, taking his outstretched hand within her own, she bent her face convulsively against it, so that it seemed to him who watched that her eyes, her lips, her hair, her tears were imbrued upon it in a strange mad passion, the like of which he had never seen before.

She might have been a minute or an hour thus, the act was so vivid, so unforgettable, so pregnant with that which sears the memory and leaves it raw. But at last the man seemed to draw her to her feet, and thereafter they stood together, talking eagerly. There was that in the frantic gestures of the woman, in her wrought attitude, and the perfervid manner of her utterance, that the landlord was able to interpret. It seemed to him that she was pouring forth a wild appeal. But listen as tensely as he might, the noise of the sea and the[93] wind, and the intervening distance, were too great for him to catch a word that fell between them.

The next thing of which the landlord was aware, was, that they were leaving the altitude on which they stood. As they prepared to descend to the path beneath, the woman hung heavily upon the strange man’s arm. And as they came down the incline of the rocks, they approached so near to Gamaliel’s hiding-place that the old man was able to train his eyes full upon them; and the moonlight and the light of the woman’s lantern falling on them too, they became a feast for his curiosity. He was able to discern almost every detail of the stranger’s countenance; and as he did so, he had to strangle the cry of surprise that welled up on his lips. The woman’s mysterious companion was none other than the landlord’s new serving-man, Will Jackson.

[94]

CHAPTER VII
The Woman

BY the time Gamaliel had recovered a little of his amaze, the man and the woman had gone past him; and when at last he reached his feet to follow them, they were already lost to sight in the descent. Judging them to be upon the path that led back to his inn, and that thither doubtless was their destination, the landlord stumbled down[95] as speedily as he could towards it. As he had supposed, the woman and his serving-man had reached it too, and were steering a straight course to the inn. The landlord crouched after them as stealthily as ever. It was his desire to see without disturbing them. He must observe every detail of their behaviour, and afterwards construe it at his leisure. To his mind there never was so deep a mystery as the wild business of that night.

When they came to the inn they stayed a minute underneath the sign, and resumed their eager converse. Again was the landlord too far off to hear the purport of it, but there was still the same passion and excitement on the woman’s side as formerly; and when they parted—the lady through the open kitchen door, and the serving-man to a temporary bed of straw that had been found for him in the stable at the back—there was again that astounding incident of her lips being pressed upon the fellow’s hand.

The landlord waited until Will Jackson had retired, and then hastily came up just as the[96] woman had entered the kitchen and was about to close the door. Without saying a word, he put his shoulder to it and forced an entry. He paid no heed to the woman until the door was bolted, so that no one might intrude, and he had got the candles lit. Then he turned upon his victim.

That the winterly cold had struck her he could see. Her pale face was mottled with blue patches where its claws had pinched her; the belated hair that had wriggled from her hood hung on her temples limp and wet; and the fingers of one starved hand were stiffened to the burnt-out lantern that they bore. She had a crying need for warmth and kindness, but those were luxuries that Master Gamaliel administered only to himself. Thus he poured some brandy forth and drank it briskly, and warmed his frozen hands at the candle-blaze. He then felt strong enough to turn his attention to the lady.

“Madam,” he said, “this is a very serious thing. I await your explanation of it, madam.”

[97]Saying this, he craftily assumed a place between her and the stairs leading to the bedfast traveller’s chamber. Her retreat was intercepted.

She looked at him dumbly, and did not answer. But she lifted her pleading eyes up to his face of stone, as one who knew the great powers residing in them, and who was accustomed to employ them as weapons of defence. The landlord laughed a little insolently.

“I am very weary,” said the woman. “Can we not choose a better season to discuss this matter?”

“Madam,” said the landlord harshly, “I choose to discuss it now. But first, before I do so, I must have your name. Your companion and yourself have been two days immured in my best taffety chamber fronting the sea, yet up to this very hour have I been denied what is the first essential to us innkeepers. But, madam, I must have it now.”

The woman looked at his cold face falteringly. Then she withdrew her eyes and took a further refuge in her silence.

[98]“Madam, I demand it,” said Gamaliel, sternly. “The times are greatly perilous, and what assurances have I that you are not a pair of malignants, a pair of proscribed Royalists, a pair of Charles Stuart’s friends and my Lord Cromwell’s enemies?”

The woman trembled. When the hunted doe takes to the water, it has the look and manner that the pale woman had then. The landlord wrote every inflection of her demeanour down in his heart. His two little eyes, now contracted with their cunning so that they looked like two glass beads in his head, pierced her like steel. In spite of herself she shuddered. She closed her own eyes that she might not see them.

“Madam, I swear I will not be put off,” said the landlord. “I demand your name and the name of your companion.”

The woman’s lips were frozen. Twice she struggled to speak, and twice no words issued from them. The landlord had chosen his moment craftily. The unexpectedness of his appearance at that hour, and the shaken state she[99] was in already, thanks to her adventures in the night, left her at a hopeless disadvantage. She might have the desire to dissemble, but she certainly had not the power. She was bound hand and foot at his mercy.

“I would prefer to withhold our names for the present,” she said at last, in a hoarse whisper.

“That you shall not do, madam,” said the landlord. “I must have your names here, now, this instant.”

Again the landlord enclosed her with his cold eyes. They fascinated her, they pinned her helpless, they changed her blood into stone; they were the eyes with which the snake holds the fragile bird. The same bale and venom crept into them as he gazed upon the frightened creature, and as she cowered and shrank away, a smile and a sneer crept together round his mouth slowly. The moment to strike the victim was at hand.

“So you cannot give them, madam,” he said,[100] with a suave mockery. “So you cannot give them. I do not know, madam, that I am surprised. I should have been more surprised had you been able to do so. In the very hour of your coming, I formed my own opinion of you. I am not altogether a blind man, madam,—I am not. And when in that first hour of your coming, madam, in a most unholy and exceptional season that is not very usual for simple honest travellers to employ, you had recourse to a lie——”

For an instant the woman’s chin went up imperiously, and a spark kindled in her eyes.

“I repeat, madam,” said the suave landlord, “in the very first hour of your coming you had recourse to a lie. You said your husband suffered from an incurable disease. More correctly, you should have said a bullet wound obtained a few weeks ago at the battle of Worcester.”

It was a shot in the dark, but it found its mark. The woman fell back against the stairs with a face the colour of snow.

“No, madam,” the landlord went on, “I can[101] confess to no surprise at the course you have taken. It is hardly to be supposed that the wife of a proscribed cavalier, who hath come a fugitive to a lonely inn on the seacoast, in the hope of slipping over to France on a dark night, should be willing to publish his name to all and sundry. But it is a fortunate circumstance that old Gamaliel Hooker hath a few wits in his head, otherwise a notable traitor to his country might have escaped his deserts, and there would be one malignant more than there should be in the world.”

The landlord had trimmed his cruel words, and, uttered them slowly. Each one sank like a sharp-pointed knife into the very flesh of the woman. She shrank away from him, torn, bleeding, trembling.

“Happily,” said the landlord in the same clear-cut, long-drawn, formal tone, “Gamaliel Hooker is not a man to shirk his plain and manifest duty. A few hours prior to your appearance a band of soldiers called here, and told me where I might find them should any malignants appear. I will send an information[102] to them the first thing in the morning. And now I give you good-night, madam; I think after our nocturnal wanderings we shall both welcome a return to bed.”

The landlord made to go upstairs. He would reserve the question of what she was doing in the dead of night, and her highly singular conduct towards his serving-man, until the morrow. He must not exhaust all his weapons at once; he would save a few with which to amuse himself at his leisure. But he had enjoyed using these vastly. He would teach her to take him trapesing in the dead of the night through the winter gale!

However, as the landlord made to retire the woman sprang forward with an appeal. She clung to his coat with her frozen hands.

“It is a matter for the Lord Protector,” he said. “But I have yet to hear that he is a merciful man.”

“You will not deliver up my poor husband,” she cried,—“you will not be so cruel!”

For the second time that night the woman fell upon her knees. She flung herself at the landlord’s feet. There never was grosser clay in the world than his. He neither pitied nor spared her. Nay, he prolonged the agony of her self-abasement to the last bitter moment. He drew out the frenzy of her abandonment to its last wild prayer. He derived an intimate pleasure from the picture of the creature at his feet, casting herself upon his mercy. It was the rarest nectar to his self-esteem; he sipped it to the dregs and smacked his lips upon it. He waited as one melting in spite of himself, and then dashed her hopes to the earth by adopting the same precise, formal voice he had used before:

“I beseech you; I implore you!” cried the unhappy woman. “Will you have no mercy for the sufferings of a wife?”

“Will you have no pity for the agonies of a[104] mother?” she cried. “Will you not spare the father of the babe I bear?”

In the mad frenzy of her fear she suddenly rose to her feet, with all the blood quivering and sparkling now in her cheeks. The landlord admitted to himself, even as he tortured her, that there never was so perfectly noble, so perfectly magnificent a creature as this wretched lady. But when she flung back her cloak to lend the prayer of her motherhood an additional emphasis, he laughed in her face.

It was more than the woman could endure; the last appeal of her sex had been despised. The shame and the agony overcame her; she sank senseless to the kitchen floor.

The landlord, by a deft use of cordials and cold water, brought her to her senses very soon.

The landlord, deeming that the comedy had gone far enough for that night at least, thought it time he appeared in his true character. He exchanged the formal tone he had[105] used when he spoke of doing his duty, for one more natural to him.

“You shall purchase a day’s respite, madam,” he said, in a brisk voice of business, “on one condition.”

“Take that ring of sapphires off your finger, madam, and place it in my hand. On that condition, I will undertake not to lodge an information against your husband during the next twenty-four hours.”

The woman plucked off the ring eagerly, and, giving it to the landlord, thanked him with eyes that shone far more bravely than the jewels that she gave away. In the security of the short respite she had purchased, she went upstairs to the chamber of her stricken lord. It was almost less than nothing; yet, after all, there was one day more left to her in which she might struggle wildly for her husband’s safety.

The landlord had no desire to return to his couch. He was too excited by the strange events of the night, and too eager to meditate upon what manner they affected him, and the[106] nature of the mystery he had been confronted with, to have any hope of going to sleep. Therefore he rekindled the fire, brewed himself a posset, charged his long pipe with tobacco, and sat down to reflection. He was hugely pleased with his own conduct of the last half-hour. The woman was entirely at his mercy. He would be able to wring her jewels and money from her with ridiculous ease; whilst at the eleventh hour, when all their portable possessions had become his own, he would still be able to save his reputation by giving them over to Cromwell’s men. He gazed tenderly on the bright jewel in his hand. He amused himself by computing the value of the stones within it, and figuring out in his mind what he stood to gain. These were brave times indeed! Why, he had already earned more during that last half-hour than in a year of quiet, jog-trot trading. And this was, doubtless, nothing to the wealth they had upstairs. He only hoped the soldiers would not return and discover their owners, ere he could take them for himself. But Master Gamaliel was[107] not without a certain confidence in his own acquisitiveness; he shrewdly suspected that in any case they were doomed to lodge in his custody. Oh, if the King would only come his way as well!

He then turned his attention to the strange events of the night. He was morally sure that the woman had gone forth to discover Diggory Fargus’s boat or that of some other mariner, and that her meeting with Will Jackson, the serving-man, was, as far as she was concerned, an accidental one. But what could account for her extraordinary behaviour on his appearance? Why had she adopted so wrought and passionate an attitude towards him? Most probably for the same reason that she had adopted it a little later towards himself: she feared him. Him, too, she had been beseeching. Of course she had been begging him not to betray her; but why should she be at such pains to implore a fellow like that not to do so? The landlord recalled the incident of Will Jackson going up the ladder. It was then he first knew that she and her husband were at the[108] inn. Gamaliel recalled how his serving-man had rushed pellmell to the ground as though he had seen a ghost, whilst the woman above pierced the night with her wild cry. What could be the significance of that recognition?

The landlord built a theory. This Will Jackson had probably been lately in their employment; and the woman knowing him to be so well acquainted with their circumstances, and that he was doubtless a rogue to boot, she felt her husband to be undone. Again, the serving-man’s surprise would not be unnatural. It would be a rather dramatic thing to go up that ladder, and for him to discover his former patrons thus. Assuming that to be the case, it was not unlikely that the woman, utterly desperate as she was, ventured into the night to find Will Jackson and to propitiate him with her prayers. Yet, after all, she was not likely to find him by the side of the sea.

The landlord was unable to settle this last point definitely in his mind; but the remainder of the theory he thought very excellent. However, be that as it may, he would take the first[109] opportunity of having Will Jackson’s version of the affair. Here a new thought assailed the landlord. Last night, when the fellow fled down the ladder, had he not positively asserted and reiterated that he had never seen the persons upstairs before? He had lied—he had lied foully. Not only had he seen them, but he was intimately acquainted with the woman at least. But he would have the truth out of the fellow. Could it be that some more guilty secret than he suspected lay between them? Was some deep mystery involved? The landlord nestled nearer to the embers, and went over all the ground again. Why should a serving-man and a woman of condition be so intimate and familiar one with the other? She was a lady—a woman of quality, he was sure—yet with his own eyes he had seen her on her knees to the fellow; and she had kissed his hands.

[110]

CHAPTER VIII
The King’s face

WHEN a few slow hours had passed, and the household of the “Sea Rover” were astir, the landlord lost no time in despatching his son to the stable to summon Will Jackson to his presence.

The serving-man soon afterwards shambled into the kitchen, wearing a particularly sleepy and unkempt look. He pulled his[111] forelock to Gamaliel gravely; yawned, and rubbed his weary eyes on the sleeve of his jerkin. The landlord regarded him keenly. It seemed almost impossible that this rustic clod and the beautiful woman upstairs should have anything in common. But what of her behaviour on the rock during the night? Could it merely have been fright at his appearance? Hardly that: besides, his own behaviour had been very incongruous, considering what a bucolic clown of a fellow he was during the daytime. Yet was he such a clown after all? Had not the landlord first remarked about him that he appeared to have wits rather above his station? However, he would see.

“Nay, not I,” said the fellow. “Too tired I was; I lay down in my straw and slept like a hog.”

“You are lying to me,” said the landlord,[112] raising his voice. “You walked out on to the top of one of those rocks by the seashore, and there you met the woman in the chamber upstairs. You met her there in the middle of the night; you talked to her; and she fell on her knees before you, and she kissed your hands. I know all, you lying villain! Now, sirrah, confess the reason of it all, or take the consequences.”

The serving-man twitched not a muscle. He regarded his master with a stolidity amounting almost to the bovine, and he blankly professed his ignorance of the charge. The landlord grew furious.

The serving-man merely replied by a look of profound indifference. To the angry and astonished landlord, it seemed to amount almost to contempt. Will Jackson appeared to consider that his denial was enough. He neither entered into the merits of the matter, nor took the trouble to soften the force of his affirmation.

[113]Gamaliel had never been so nonplussed in his life. He had proof positive that his serving-man had been out in the night, and that he was intimately acquainted with the woman upstairs. Yet here he audaciously denied all knowledge of her.

“By God, sirrah!” cried the landlord, “I will see to it that you hang before a week is out, as an aider and abettor of proscribed Royalists fleeing the country, if you persist in this most abominable falsehood.”

The serving-man shrugged his shoulders. He still seemed to have a perfect indifference to the landlord’s threats. And, indeed, Master Gamaliel fumed and browbeat in vain. It was precious little satisfaction he got out of the lumpish Will Jackson.

He breakfasted upon the matter. Coming to review it afterwards, he did but grow more firm in his conviction that the woman and his drawer had something more to conceal than he had at first suspected. At last he decided to confront them face to face. First, he sent up his son with a message to the lady’s chamber.[114] Would she step down immediately to his father, as he desired to speak with her on a matter of the first importance? Her fear of the landlord was now so great, that she lost not an instant in complying with his demand.

Will Jackson was already submitting to another interrogatory from his master, when she came whitely and wearily down the stairs. The cunning landlord had contrived that their meeting should be in his presence. They should have no chance to pre-arrange an ignorance of one another. He now observed their demeanour with a devilish intentness, and he could swear he saw a sudden swift flush dart across the woman’s face and a hunted, hungry look of fear spring in her eyes the moment her gaze alighted on Will Jackson.

As for that clod-like servitor, he was just as imperturbable as ever. Not by the relaxing of a muscle did he betray that he had encountered the woman before. The landlord admitted to himself that such a studied stolidity was remarkable. The fellow made respectfully to withdraw on the woman’s appearance.

[115]“Not so,” said his master, roughly. “I would have you stay here, sirrah. You shall be condemned out of the mouth of your accomplice.”

“Madam,” he said, “I have sent for you to demand an explanation of your last night’s conduct. In the middle of the night you crept out of my house, climbed upon a rock in front of the open sea, and while there you encountered this serving-man of mine, Will Jackson. Madam, I demand to know what passed between you; also when and where you met my serving-man before.”

“How can madam say that,” the serving-man promptly answered for her, before she had a chance to reply on her own part, “when I have told you over and over again, good master, that I was never out last night at all; and, if you must know, the only time she hath seen me before this morning was when you sent me up the ladder to spy upon her. Then it was she happened to raise her eyes to the window,[116] and accidentally caught mine looking at her.”

“Silence, you insolent scoundrel!” roared the landlord. “How dare you presume to put words in the mouth of this lady! You impertinent dog! Come, madam, I await your explanation of this odd circumstance.”

The woman stood silent, with her head bent upon the ground. The landlord was obliged to admit that the exceeding promptness of his clod of a servant had done a great deal towards outwitting him. She had had her cue from this impudent rogue. It was too plain that she was striving to summon up the courage to utilise it.

“Come, madam,” cried the landlord; “I would not have you attempt to dissemble. You are not of the pattern of a dissembler, as witness your somewhat melancholy performance in that role in the small hours of this morning. Be frank, madam. I prithee do not exhaust my patience. Your respite of twenty-four hours may suffer a curtailment else.”

This threat was not without its effect. The[117] landlord grimly noted how the fear sprang to her eyes. He noted, too, that as she raised them they rested a moment wildly on Will Jackson’s face. His countenance, however, the landlord saw with a new amazement, was absolutely empty and passive. The fellow was either a clown of no capacity at all, or a man of an infinite wit, resource, and intelligence.

“You are lying, madam!” the landlord cried in his brutal manner; “and, my God! if you lie to me I will rescind my promise, and your husband shall be delivered within the hour into the hands of his enemies. And this fellow, Will Jackson, shall be given up also, as an aider and abettor of dangerous Royalists.”

“No, no; not that!” she moaned. “Not that! You will not be so cruel—so unmerciful.”

[118]“Madam, I will not be trifled with,” said the landlord. “If you do not speak the truth to me, all three of you shall be given up.”

“Oh, sir,” she said, trembling like a reed in the wind, “it is indeed the truth. I beg you to believe me.”

“I never saw a worse hand at a lie,” said the landlord, with a sneer. “But, ’fore God! you shall pay for it. Joseph, do you come here instantly.”

The landlord summoned his son. That rather dismal youth obeyed his father’s call with a resentful alacrity.

“Madam,” said the landlord, “I give you one minute by this watch of mine in which to make your decision. Confess the truth, and the twenty-four hours’ respite holds good. Persevere in this monstrous falsehood, and you shall pay for it in your husband’s blood. I have never yet seen the man, let alone the woman, who could trifle with Gamaliel Hooker. And, sirrah, do you heed this also. As I’m a live man, you shall swing in a gibbet for this!”

[119]The old man ended in a gust of fury that carried him away. He then said to his son:

“I fear me, Joseph, that you must go saddle your horse in a minute. I shall be wanting you to take a message to a certain place I wot of.”

The landlord pulled forth his watch and began to count the seconds dramatically. The woman seemed petrified to stone.

“I ask you for the last time, madam, what you know of this fellow,” said the implacable landlord. “Refuse to tell me, and it is your unhappy husband, not yourself, who pays the price.”

None knew more perfectly than the landlord how to torture her. Again he had the wretched creature on her knees before him; and again he had the privilege of laughing in her face.

The landlord turned towards him and gazed at him in blank astonishment. It was not so much the drawer’s words, audacious as they were, that had this electrical effect on Gamaliel[120] Hooker. It was the manner of their utterance. They were spoken in a full, calm voice, quiet and self-contained, and one that sounded mighty odd from the mouth of a servant. For, above all, it had a tone that even a bold man would have found it hard to disobey.

“Rise, madam,” said the serving-man, and, bending forward towards her, he assisted her to do so.

She trembled so violently when she got upon her feet that she could hardly stand. But she kept her face averted from the audacious servitor in a singularly painful way. She seemed afraid to look at him.

“We will have done with play-acting, if you please,” said the drawer, addressing his master, but, strangely enough, in the same authoritative voice. “After all, is it not a little vulgar, and a little cowardly?”

The astonished landlord spluttered out a string of oaths. But he was almost inarticulate with anger and bewilderment. A frank sparkle of amusement showed at the same time in Will Jackson’s eyes. The transformation of his[121] voice was extending to his face; nay, to his person and his bearing too. Where a minute ago there had been stolid inanimation and indifference, were intelligence and vivacity. Where there had been lumpishness and awkwardness of gait, were graciousness and breeding. The fellow still wore his coarse rustic clothes, his face was still bedaubed with dirt, but he was no longer the same person. The landlord was slowly beginning to recognise the fact.

It seemed that his transformed serving-man was on the point of telling him, when the poor lady, who seemed just now to be acting in a kind of delirium, stayed him suddenly by placing her two hands on the leathern sleeve of his jerkin.

“No, no, no!” she cried; “it must not be. Whatever the cost, it must not be.”

Neither the man nor the woman paid heed to[122] him now, however. There seemed some far graver matter between them.

“At all costs,” the landlord heard the woman say to his serving-man in a hoarse whisper, “I implore you to be wise, to be discreet. It is not for yourself alone I beseech you; think, oh! think of all that it means.”

Her voice, too, was changing. While she spoke, it lost something of its wildness. It still throbbed with its passion, but above it was a yearning tenderness, a maternal solicitude that dominated it completely.

“Nay,” said Will Jackson, with his strange, cool smile again creeping out of his eyes. “What’s the odds? I am weary to death of this farce; it is become intolerable. And, after all, we are in the hands of God, are we not? There is but our destiny to trust to.”

“But must we not shape it?” said the woman. “You may mitigate it, or enhance it, by your unremitting prudence. I beseech you to remember, all is not lost. There are still those that are your friends. Be wary, be discreet, I pray you.”

[123]It distinctly seemed to the landlord’s eager ears that the woman had as great a solicitude for this fellow as her husband—nay, an even greater one. For was she not apparently prepared to sacrifice her lord, rather than Will Jackson should reveal the secret between them?

Gamaliel was cunning enough; but, after all, cunning is a quality with grievous limitations. It is the offspring of a mean mind, and is therefore of value only up to a particular point. Therefore what should have been by now as clear as day to the innkeeper was still quite obscure. Instead of reading the plain, simple truth, he went deeper than a more straightforward person would have done, and missed it altogether. He was convinced that the woman and the man—whoever he was, he was no serving-man—stood one to the other in a guilty relation. The previous night he had witnessed an assignation; and, further, now that the woman had to choose between this fellow and her husband, she was ready to sacrifice her husband.

There never was anything so plain, the landlord[124] thought, yet he flattered himself that it was not everyone who would have found it so. This fine theory was doomed to perish almost as soon as it was born, however. Despite all that the woman had done to urge him to prudence, this strangest of serving-men insisted, in his cool, smiling, slightly indifferent manner, on going his own way.

“My dear madam,” he said, in a louder tone than any he had yet employed, “we honour your devotion and your solicitude; we shall ever cherish it vastly. But we are a-weary of this mumming, of this intolerable play-acting; we yawn to death. ’Twere better far to perish of the axe than to die thus incontinently. Besides, we are hungry and thirsty. The food our landlord reserves for his servants is fit only for swine. Landlord, have the goodness to hold your peace, and fetch us a cup of sack and a nuncheon of bread and meat. ’Od’s body! never was a king’s belly so sharp before.”

At last the landlord saw. At first his bewilderment was so great that he could have been easily felled by a feather. Every emotion[125] that the old rogue had was suddenly laid stark naked by this wonderful revelation of the King; indeed, his behaviour was so ludicrous that that frank young man burst out a-laughing at him. Too excited to speak, too dumbfounded to act, too paralysed with all the conflicting sensations let loose in his head to be able to think, he was as one suddenly become deaf, dumb, and blind. He could neither see nor hear; he could neither speak nor lift a finger. The occasion was too great for him; he had lost control of his own entity.

In the meantime the anguish of the poor lady was even more terrible, more unutterable than before.

“Oh, my King! my King!” she wailed, “what hast thou done? My God! what hast thou done?”

“Peace, dear lady, peace,” he said. “This is no season for your tears. Landlord, I asked you a minute since for a cup of sack. ’Od’s fish! you must obey me, landlord; I am no[126] longer your servitor, to be kicked and cuffed and bullied, but your King. I wonder if the royal coat was ever tarnished with such dirty hands before.”

The King looked a little deprecatingly at the sleeve of his leather jerkin. In lieu of the morose, thick-witted Will Jackson, he now stood forth a frank and jovial rogue enough. For all the disguise of his dirt and his rags, his kingship seemed suddenly to make him a gentleman. As a serving-man or a wandering vagabond he would still have been excellent; but granted his kingliness, he made no such very bad specimen of a monarch. The title shone forth in his swarthy looks, added a freedom to his manners, and a grace to his bearing, as, in the fashion of a simple commoner, he drank his sack and munched his nuncheon, and offered words of gallantry and comfort to his beautiful, distressed companion. But in the absence of the title, he would still have done very well for Will Jackson. As is the way with many another, the coat was the man. It required the label of King to make him one;[127] but once affixed, it certainly suited him admirably.

“Is my lord strong enough to receive me,” he asked the lady as he disposed of the last morsel of his bread and meat.

“I pray that he may ever be strong enough to receive your Majesty,” said the lady, fervently. “May I conduct you to his chamber, Sire?”

The King and the lady went together up the creaking old stairs. The landlord rubbed his hands across his bewildered eyes. He then sat down suddenly, or rather fell, into his chair at the side of the hearth.

[128]

CHAPTER IX
The man in Bed

WHEN the king came softly into the chamber, the stricken man lay pale in his pillows, asleep. The sufferer, now that the grave crisis of his malady was past—it having come to its head on the night the bullet was taken from his body—looked fairer and more youthful than ever. He hardly appeared more than a boy. As he lay in[129] his present unconsciousness, much of the petulance had gone out of his countenance; there was a tender and even sweet expression round his lips; and in many ways his face was far better to look upon than on the sad night of his arrival at the inn.

“Harry,” said his wife, in an eager tone, “open your eyes and look at his Majesty; the King hath come to see you.”

The sufferer, however, was too deeply asleep to be aroused by the soft tones of the woman.

“Do not disturb him, I pray,” said Charles. “I would not do him the least disservice for the world, not even to the robbing him of five minutes of his precious sleep. We Stuarts owe too much to him and his ever to take wantonly from one of his name that which we can never give back again. His grandfather, his father, and himself, have they not given their all—their lands, their blood, nay, their lives—for our poor father’s cause and our own? I know not what fidelity it is in a family that they should from generation to generation, from father to son, lavish their possessions on unfortunate[130] people who can never hope, in any adequate degree, to requite them.”

Charles, as he spoke, seemed to warm slowly into a rhapsody of sentiment. Tears even sprang out of his eyes, his lips quivered, and for the moment he appeared wholly overcome by an emotion of inexpressible regret and tenderness. In the bearer of that name it seemed an exquisitely natural manifestation. The woman, whose life had been passed in the shadow of his ineffably lamentable history, felt herself to be succumbing to this outburst from the lips of the most unfortunate Prince since the world began. The dire circumstances in which this unhappy young King was lying; his voice; his bearing; the mean disguise to which he must have recourse because the hand of every man was against him—all this, in conjunction with the outburst of feeling he now displayed, was too much for the feminine witness of it. Every night she prayed for his safety; in her dreams she saw his face; to her he was the one hero of romance, the most exquisitely noble and tender figure in the[131] whole woman’s world of the ideal. He was the prince out of the fairybook; and when she saw him thus with the tears in his eyes, and a divine tremor in his tones, her heart overflowed.

She looked at the King; she looked at him to bestow upon him the mute consolation of her tender heart. The tears were in her own eyes too; her own lips quivered. The King, half-smiling through the tears that were still coursing down his cheeks, bent towards her as if overcome by such an infinite compassion. The look of sad thanks he gave her seemed to send all the blood wild in her brain; the King’s eyes seemed to set her soul on fire. She was not conscious that he had gathered her in his arms, and that her breast was drawn against his own; indeed, of only one thing had she consciousness, and that with the vague excitement of the senses a dream or a delirium induces. It was, that the King’s lips were pressed in a fierce madness against her own.

With a little cry, she thrust him from her and burst out of his arms. Involuntarily her[132] frightened eyes fell on the sleeper in the bed. He slept no more. He lay with his eyes riveted on the King, who had his back towards him. He lay as weak and helpless as a child from the effects of his malady; but his hands were clenched on the coverlet, his white cheeks gleamed, his eyes blazed. He strove impotently to rise from his pillows, but fell back upon them gasping for breath.

The distinct sounds of his struggle were heard by the King. He desisted from his absorbing occupation, and turned round to discover their cause.

“Ha! Farnham,” he said, coolly, “so you are awake at last. I have heard of that little affair of the bullet. I must, indeed, rejoice with you that you have struggled so valiantly against its effects; I am overjoyed, my dear Farnham, to find you so far recovered.”

The unhappy husband could not repress his fury. Again he strove to rise from his bed, and again he fell back, this time with a sob of anguish, upon his pillows. The King’s smile grew more serene.

[133]“There—there, my dear Farnham,” said the even, gracious tones of Charles; “be wary, I pray you. Be discreet. I am sure you are not yet strong enough to leave your bed to greet me; I beg you not to think of doing so. Why, man, my lady tells me ’tis a miracle that thou art alive.”

The poor husband was unable to speak; rage and his weakness rendered him inarticulate.

The King continued to smile upon him with a gracious insouciance that maddened more than it soothed.

“There, there, my dear Farnham,” he said, “do not attempt to converse. I am sure you are far too weak as yet to regale us with your talk. Do not try, I pray you. I am sure madam will entertain us admirably in the meantime.”

It may have been that the unhappy young man discerned an underlying irony in the King’s words which, superadded to the burning sense of humiliation he had already suffered at his hands, turned his blood to fire; for[134] at least the King’s smooth sarcasm spurred him at last to find his tongue.

“Sire,” he said, weakly, “methinks my family merits some little consideration at your hands. They have served you long and faithfully, and your father also. I beg you, Sire, to forgive my mentioning their trifling claims upon your gratitude, but I would crave a boon.”

“You have but to put a name upon it, dear Farnham,” said the magnanimous Prince. “No one can be more deeply conscious of the services your family hath rendered ours than we are. Madam will tell you that that was the very theme upon our lips as you lay asleep. We pray you to mention this boon, dear Farnham.”

“It is, Sire,” said the unhappy husband, “that one of us two does not leave this chamber alive. Madam, I must ask you to have the goodness to assist me to rise. Sire, I crave that you may honour me by choosing your weapon. See, there is a case of pistols on the chair beside the bed.”

“I protest, my dear Farnham,” he said, laughingly, “that the boon you ask is a little peculiar.”

The man in the bed struggled with his difficult breath. At all times a hot, impetuous youth, his malady had given him less control of himself than ever. Thus his overmastering anger had caused him to pursue a course which a soberer or an older man would not have dared to suggest.

“May I beg you, Sire,” he said, “not to encumber our conversation with things that are irrelevant and unnecessary. Are the long and faithful services rendered by my family to yours enough to enable you to grant me the privilege of falling by your hand, or, if fortune is so tender to me, of you falling by mine? I am sure, Sire, you will be the first to admit, after what hath passed so recently, that the same roof should not be asked to undertake the responsibility of harbouring us both.”

“Do you persist in this, my dear Farnham?” asked the King. He was astonished[136] at the boldness of the young man, but his thoughts were veiled by his gracious air.

“I do, Sire,” said the husband, “as far as a subject may persist with his sovereign.”

“Sire, you overwhelm me,” said the husband, fervently. “Madam, I must ask you to assist me from my couch. My wretched limbs are as paper.”

“As implacable a foe as thou art a friend,” said the King. “It is, however, the only reparation we can make you.”

The unfortunate woman showed a veritable reluctance to do the behests of her lord. She looked at the King and she looked at the man in the bed with a terrified bewilderment. On the face of the one was the eternal frank smile of audacious indifference. The countenance of the other was entirely merged in his eyes. They blazed. The woman faltered; she trembled; she hung back.

[137]“Madam,” said Charles, laughing a little, “we must ask you to do the bidding of my lord. Prop up the dear fellow somehow, and give him his choice of weapons. We have injured him unwittingly; but it shall never be said of Charles Stuart that he denied a reparation to friend or enemy.”

The woman, however, was far from acceding to the behests of her husband or her King.

The cold terror that possessed her was dispelled by the necessity for action. In some vague way she felt it was her right to come between them. She felt dimly that she was the source of this quarrel.

“To do that,” said the King, “we must break our promise to my lord. And is not a promise of such a nature the most sacred compact that can be made? But, madam, let us[138] crave a similar boon of you. We would have you quit this chamber, too.”

“Not until thou hast got me from my bed and set me on my legs,” her husband said, weakly. “Then, Patsy woman, thou must do as the King bids thee. Come, now, I am about to rise. Give me your shoulder.”

The wife stirred not a finger, although the man in the bed, gasping for breath and the purple veins swelling in his forehead, contrived to raise himself on his two hands. But he could get no further; he fell back in distress upon his pillows.

“You are much too weak to quit your couch, my dear Farnham,” said Charles. “Even if you could be got upon your legs, you would never be able to keep them. But I think we can contrive it otherwise. We must support you in your present place. Madam will lend her aid, I trust.”

The woman, however, would not heed the words of the King. She hung back, convulsed with terror. Charles, laughing a little still,[139] prepared to do the office himself. He took young Lord Farnham in his arms, lifted him up among the sheets into a sitting posture, and made a wall of his pillows to keep him in it. The lad’s skin seemed to burn the arms of his monarch like a live coal; his whole frame shook and quivered; he was racked with a hectic weakness he was striving to control. The King, having at last fixed him deftly thus, turned triumphantly towards the lady.

“Confess, madam,” he said, “that you would not think, to look at us, that we had such a cunning in attendance on the sick. And now we must ask you to leave us for a minute. Only for a minute, madam; we will not deny you longer, we do promise you.”

“No, Sire,” she answered, firmly, “I cannot go; I will not go. Harry, art thou mad?”

“I think I am,” said the young man, sitting up among the pillows, in a voice so small and querulous it sounded like a child’s. “I think I am.”

“I will not stand by and see a murder done,” said the woman, with a sudden resolution.[140] “Sire, my poor lad is unhinged; he is not sane. I beseech you not to heed him.”

“Sane or mad,” said the King, “whenever our family can make a requital to his in the smallest particular, Charles Stuart shall not withhold it. The man hath set his heart upon it; he shall have all that he desires.”

In her capacity of faithful subject and hero-worshipper, the unhappy lady would have submitted to her tongue being torn out rather than such words should have been uttered by it to her Prince. But as a mother, a wife, and a woman, there was no other course than to utter them. Besides, the King was a young man, too. In a sense she felt that her riper years made her the mentor of both these headstrong youths. She seized the case of pistols lying on the settle beside the bed. Her fingers closed upon them convulsively.

“Vous êtes difficile,” he said. “Celui qui force une femme contre son gré ne viendra jamais à bout. Now, madam, if I make my tone very winning, very coaxing, wilt thou not give them to me? Come, my dearest lady.”

“Patsy,” said the man in the pillows, in his weak voice, “do not be a fool.”

The King exchanged his look of slightly humorous deprecation for a mock severity.

“I will not!” said the lady; she stamped her imperious foot. She was as pale as death. Her teeth were clenched. Her chin and mouth were as hard as the King’s eyes.

“Are you stark mad, woman?” said the petulant voice from the pillows. “The King commands you; give them up to him at once.[142] Give them up to the King at once, d’ye hear, or ’fore God! I will make you.”

Her lord struggled to get out of his bed, as if himself to wrest them from her hands. But he was powerless to move. He flopped and wriggled about in a piteous manner, like a live fish in the sand. The King laughed.

“Hush! my dear lad,” he said, “lie quiet. Never grow peremptory with a woman, never force her. Believe us, it is but a waste of energy. Be easy with ’em, my good Farnham, be easy with ’em. However, I think we will call for the landlord.”

The King opened the door of the chamber, and called down the stairs for Gamaliel Hooker. Within a minute the landlord came fussing and puffing upwards, his rosy gills inflamed by exertion, and an execrable humility oozing out of his face. The change in his demeanour from an hour before was so entirely ludicrous, that Charles clapped his hands to his ribs when he saw him, and laughed till a stitch came into his side.

[143]“There never was so unctuous a rogue in the world before,” said the King. “What a double-chinned, great paunched, incomparable old knave of an innkeeper it is to be sure! Pray do not crawl like a worm, my good Boniface, an it chafes your belly. Stand upon your legs, good fellow; your appearance is become too beastly, now you writhe upon the ground. Your congees offend me, Boniface; they offend me. They are altogether too gross for a man of my nice instinct. But a truce to our pleasantries; my lord Farnham is in a highly serious mood. Landlord, do you go into your filthy stable, and rummage about in Will Jackson’s bed of straw. You will find a leathern case concealed there. Bring it to me as speedily as may be.”

The landlord backed out of the chamber, his body still bent double, so that the tip of his nose appeared to rest on his belly.

“Pah!” said the King; “I declare I must open the window. I wonder why every species of crawling reptile leaves a nauseous oily savour behind it.”

[144]To the woman it seemed an incredibly short time ere the landlord was back again with the leathern case; to the man in the bed, an incredibly long one. To the King himself, it had no period. He was too indifferent; indeed, he was absorbed in noticing how adorable the woman looked now the defiance was in her eyes. In his opinion, she looked the better for that charming attribute.

As the unhappy lady had feared, the leathern case of the King’s was proved to contain a pair of pistols. With an inimitable air of courtesy, he offered them both to the man propped on the pillows.

“My dear Farnham,” he said, “I can assure you that they are both equally excellent. But take your choice.”

“You are too undone to prime it, Farnham,” said the King, graciously. “Pray allow me to do it for you.”

[145]The King charged the pistol deftly but deliberately. Perfectly calm, nonchalant, smiling as ever, he began to hum a rather loose ballad under his breath. Having primed Lord Farnham’s and placed it tenderly in his grasp, he primed the other for himself, with precisely the same carefulness of hand and the same carelessness of demeanour.

“Farnham,” said the King, “in these somewhat peculiar circumstances I must ask you to take the first shot.”

“Sire, you are the King,” said Lord Farnham. “No subject can take precedence of the King.”

“Unless the King requests him. But there is really no established mode of procedure, my dear Farnham. I believe this occasion to be unique—unique in the annals of the world. I cannot recall a parallel of any subject being granted such a privilege by his monarch.”

“Sire,” said Lord Farnham, impetuous boy as he was, “I am sensible that your noble, your unexampled magnanimity hath conferred such an honour on me and mine as was never[146] conferred upon a house before. Sire, I am overcome by it, believe me.”

The young man’s face showed how deeply sensible he was of the King’s singular generosity. He had lost control of its muscles. It twitched as one of rare sensibility may sometimes do under the stress of a ravishing piece of music. The King, on his part, was young and impetuous too. He knew it, and he was aware that he had granted a request that, had either of them been older or more sober blooded, it would have been impossible to prefer, let alone to concede.

“My dear Farnham,” he said, having for the first time a sense of the vast responsibilities his kingship implied, “we have given to you, I hope you understand, that which we could not possibly have given to another. It is in consideration, my dear Farnham, of the long and honourable services of your house to mine. We must insist that you fire first. If we create a precedent in the history of the world, we must name all the conditions of it.”

Lord Farnham bowed his head in assent.[147] He could not trust himself to speak. For the first time he fully realised how terrible the circumstances were. The King stood opposite his pillows at the foot of the bed. His arms were folded with the same inimitable nonchalance as ever. There was the same slightly humorous indifference in his eyes, the same whimsical deprecation about his mouth. It was as if the whole affair amused him a little, and bored him a little too.

The implacable husband, hardly daring to look at Charles, raised the pistol in his trembling fingers. As he did so, his wife stepped in front of the King.

“Harry,” she said, “thou art surely mad; thou art overwrought a little with thy weakness. The fever is not yet out of thy blood. Lie down, mine own, and get thee to sleep again.”

Farnham regarded her with the ingenuous naïveté of a child. For the first time a look of irresolution crept into his wilful eyes. Suddenly he allowed the pistol to slip from his fingers on to the coverlet.

[148]“You are right, Patsy woman,” he said, with a groan. “I can’t do it; my God! I can’t do it.”

[149]

CHAPTER X
Le Roi s’amuse

AGAIN the King adopted his favourite trick of clapping his hands to his ribs, and shouting his laughter.

“Too absurd, too absurd!” he said. “I protest, Farnham, you make me laugh. You can’t do it, hey? You can’t shoot your King. My dear Farnham, do you really hold that to be so remarkable? Confess,[150] now, did you ever seriously for a moment think you could?”

“What a pity you did not recognise your limitations sooner, Farnham,” said the King. “Think of the pother you would have spared yourself.”

“That you should ever have thought that you could have slain your sovereign, my dear Farnham, is the most whimsical thing I ever heard in my life.”

“Not altogether, Sire,” said the young man significantly. “Your Majesty may recall instances of regicide.”

“You should have spared us that, Farnham,” said the King reproachfully. An almost human emotion seemed for once to be in his eyes. They were full of pain.

“I crave your forgiveness, Sire,” said the man in the bed. “I was a little carried away.”

“As you say,” said Charles, “there have been instances of regicide. But it is only the[151] canaille who are guilty of that crime. I do not think gentlemen are addicted to it.”

The young man sank back in his pillows. Observing both him and his wife to be grievously overwrought by what had passed, the King withdrew from the chamber to talk to the landlord below. He promised to return soon.

When the door had closed upon him, and his steps had died away on the stairs, the unhappy young man whispered to the woman:

“Canst thou forgive me?” said the wife. “I, too, was mad. I did not know what I did, or where I was. I did but know he was the King, the most unfortunate King in all the world. I did but know he was hunted for his life, like some poor wild animal. And when I saw his face, and his eyes shone on me, I think I could have fallen dead in the agony of seeing him. Yes, mine own, I, too, was mad.”

“Curse him!” said the husband. “I would have slain him had I had the power. But when[152] I looked into his face, even with the weapon in my hands, all the little strength within my body suddenly ran out of it. I could not slay him; he was the King.”

“Yes, the King,” said the wife, thrillingly. “Always the King—the most unfortunate King in all the world.”

“There is something about him,” said the husband, wildly; “whether it be his face, his name, his virtues, his vices, his father’s fate, or his own lamentable history, I know not, but there is something about him that even his bitterest enemies are unable to withstand. I was by his rein in Worcester fight, and twice I saw the blow levelled that was to deprive him forever of his kingdom, and twice it did not fall. I can see the look in the eyes of one grim Roundhead even now, as he stood with his pike poised within a foot of the King’s neck. And when, striking, he saw it to be the King, he stayed his weapon in mid-air and directed it upon another. I know not what quality it be within him.”

“It is because the name he bears,” the[153] woman said, “is the noblest and the most ill-fated name that ever a king did bear.”

A demon was in the young man’s heart. It was probably the fact that his own life could ill-support a scrutiny which lent a poignance to his jealousy; and is it not he the least without taint who is the readiest to cast the stone? The consciousness embittering his spirit that he was in no sense worthy of the woman who watched over him so tenderly, caused him almost fiercely to resent the intrusion of another within her thoughts. He feared the security of his own position there. There is no form of this disease so acute as that which springs from the sufferer’s knowledge of his own inferiority. The King was nobler, handsomer, more alluring to the eyes of a woman than he. His misfortunes and his station made him dreadful in the eyes of a jealous man. He hated the King, not so much for what he had done, as for what he had it in his power to do. It seemed to the young man in the depths of his remorse that[154] Charles had it in his power to bereave him of the only thing in life he cared for.

“Patsy woman,” he said, miserably, “I begged you to let me perish of that inflammation the other night. Oh, why did you not! It would have been better for us all. You know I am not worthy of you; you know I never can be worthy of you, weak fool as I am. It would have been more merciful to let me perish. I should not then have been condemned to lie here helpless in my bed and watch another steal away your love from me. He is a King, I know; but I cannot bear it.”

The woman returned to the bedside and replaced her hand tenderly within his own.

“Foolish child,” she said,—“foolish, jealous child! And yet mine is the blame. I should have ordered my susceptibilities better. He was our King, helpless and without a friend, driven from pillar to post, with never a place of security in which to soothe his weariness. It was the glamour of his unhappiness that overcame me. But, mine own, are you not my king also?”

[155]“You cannot have two,” said the young man. “I would have you choose between us.”

“Then, since you will have it so,” said the woman eagerly, “you are the king I choose, mine own. The other is but the prince in the fairybook; the delicious unreality that obtrudes in the dreams of girls in the middle of the night. You are the true prince of flesh and blood; he, the vague shadow without an entity.”

The husband and wife were drawn together in a caress of reconciliation, when footsteps were heard upon the stairs. They were followed by the entrance of the King.

Now that their hearts were at peace one towards another, Charles’s friends were able to attend to the terrible situation in which all three found themselves. They both observed with something of a shock that, although the King knew his life to hang on a mere thread, he seemed wholly indifferent to his fate. It would have been superb had it not been too grievous to contemplate.

“I have been talking with our landlord,” he[156] said, “and I must say I like him no better now I am his master instead of his servant. There never was a countenance of such a concentrated villainy, I think. I never saw such greedy, shifty little eyes as that man hath. I have been talking to him for half an hour, but never once have I got him to look me in the face. I am sure Judas Iscariot was a man of scruples by comparison.”

“Sire,” said the woman, “your only hope lies in immediate flight. You must go at once from here, Sire. That man, the landlord, is hungry to betray you, and probably hath already done so. Oh, flee at once, Sire!”

“Anywhere, anywhere away from this hateful house, Sire,” said the lady. “But you must go at once. Tarry an hour, and all may be lost.”

The King sat down in a chair, wearily. He yawned, and covered his eyes with his hands.

“I think not to-day, madam,” he said, in a voice whose diffidence hurt her like a blow,—“not[157] to-day, I think. I have not the energy. Besides, how tired I am of it all, how utterly weary! The game is not worth the candle. My friends urge me to flee this way and that; they conceal me in ditches, up trees, behind secret panels, and in priests’ holes, day after day. They bring me food in the dark; paint my face; clap various disguises about me, each more hideous than the one before. They turn me about from pillar to post; head me, cut me off, send me back again; confound me with all manner of conflicting counsels. And for what? That I may still fall into the hands of my enemies. I am not now a yard nearer my freedom than I was when I rode from the field of Worcester. I am wearied to death by the whole business; I am tired; I yawn. I will take a day’s rest, the first for many a wretched month; I will take it in your society, madam, and see if I have a better inclination to continue this struggle of one unhappy man against overwhelming circumstance to-morrow.”

“There will be no to-morrow, Sire,” said the[158] lady. “Tarry here in this accursed place till then, and you will be surely ta’en.”

Her voice had the fullest conviction in it. It was no leap in the dark, no idle prophecy. Too well did she know the man downstairs with whom she had had to deal.

The King shook his head and smiled bitterly. There was no banishing the melancholy indifference from his voice. He was bored by the whole affair, and he was such a wilful fellow, that he would not stir a finger to save his own life if he had not the inclination. He was tired and depressed and sick of heart. At this moment it suited him better to be the prey of melancholy and to give rein to his sad fancies. He preferred to utilise those misfortunes which made him so irresistible in the eyes of all, particularly those of women.

It might have been that the extreme beauty of this compassionate lady was working upon him to his own undoing. For certainly, now that the wilful young King found himself in her presence, the desire uppermost in his mind was to stay in it. His life hung on a thread,[159] and with it the hopes of thousands of his countrymen and the destinies of nations; but because a beautiful woman had pitied him, for the nonce he preferred to sit still and bask in her tears. To-morrow the mercury might rise. He might then find the energy to save his neck, or to attempt to do so; but to-day his inclination was far otherwise. He was disposed to give the rein to his adorable melancholy; and to wrap his cold spirit warmly in a woman’s sorrow.

The woman, cut to the heart by the young man’s wanton disregard of his sacred duty, had, with the instinct that often is with those that possess a singular potency, divined one factor of it. Her heart stood still. The horror of the thought almost overcame her. That she, in her own person, should be the unconscious and unwilling means of her King’s destruction! Unhappy, wayward youth, that his blood should be upon her head! The thought was impossible to endure.

“Sire,” she said wildly, “thou canst not have considered of all thy dalliance means.[160] The last person a king can think of is himself. His responsibilities are more than personal. Sire, you must indeed go. Consider the destiny of your race, consider your friends.”

The young King’s eyes sparkled at the noble passion of her countenance. He had never seen a face so glorious. However, it did but confirm the satisfaction he took from his present case. He was more than content. To-morrow would be soon enough to begin his irksome toils again.

He loved to hear the throbbing tones of the woman; he loved to gaze upon her face. The passionate tenderness that suffused her was like a great and aged wine, that lulled his blood and warmed it, and made it sweeter in the veins. Languid and indifferent as he was, sparks were kindled in his eyes, and they were there for all to see. The woman saw them. She shuddered, even as the prayer was on her lips. They seemed to stop the beatings of her heart.

The husband saw the King’s eyes, too. The old hatred and jealous rage were smouldering[161] in him still. It would not call for much to fan them into flame. His hands were clenched once more on the coverlet, a red spot burned dully in the centre of his dead white cheeks. Involuntarily he added a prayer of his own to that of his wife.

The husband’s tones, however, had the passion without the magnetic quality of the wife’s. They grated on the King’s ear. He looked up a little startled at the man in the bed, and then he smiled.

“The solicitude of our friends,” he said, “grows more and more remarkable. Never was a monarch encompassed by so much disinterestedness.”

The sneer was so slight as to be hardly perceptible, but poor Farnham felt ready to slay him for it. That young man, however, by his ill-timed interposition, had retarded rather than advanced the end he wished to attain. The King settled himself more snugly upon his chair. He even requested the permission[162] of the lady to put his weary legs upon the settle standing beside the bed. He asked her to allow him to have recourse to tobacco. A spice of mischief had now been added to his inclination. He was more firmly resolved than ever that on this day he would take his ease in his inn, in congenial society. Let to-morrow come when it might; let the consequences be what they may.

The unhappy lady read the King’s doom in his demeanour. Everything was lost. Only too well did she know that the man downstairs would eagerly utilise each second the King tarried at his inn for his own profit. Despair seized her. There was nothing to be done in the face of his appalling indifference and his wilfulness. She knew, as surely as he set his legs on the settle and rested his back against her husband’s bed with something of a subtle, humorous mockery, that his fate was sealed. Her foreboding heart told her that, for the King, to-morrow would never dawn. God! he would be taken like a rat in a trap. He would be taken there, in her husband’s chamber.

[163]And who had caused him to be taken there? Who had been the unwilling agent of his tarrying? The thought was too terrible to bear. She clasped her hands to her bosom, where lay the King’s image in miniature. Again the tears trembled in the woman’s eyes. The King remarked them and took them to himself.

[164]

CHAPTER XI
The Psychology of cowardice

SINCE that first strange hour of the King’s revelation, Gamaliel Hooker had sat in his chimney-side, except for the few brief minutes in which he had done his Majesty’s behests. Very naturally, in the first shock of the King’s appearance his wits had deserted him. An event of such magnitude had never happened in his life before.

Presently, with the King upstairs out of the way, and his generous potations to strengthen him and to calm his nerves, the landlord’s wits strayed back slowly, one at a time. To think that the King should come in the guise of a serving-man, and that he should be such a blind fool as not to recognise him when he came! And ye gods, to think what sacrilegious hands he had laid upon the royal person! To think how roughly, not to say angrily, he had addressed him! Gamaliel never came so near being a sensitive man, as in the first horrified five minutes of his returning faculties.

These were the secondary thoughts which occupied his mind at first. But soon there were others. As he sat sipping his liquor and ruminating over the events of the morning, he felt them dimly to be shaping themselves. They were gradually coming forward. And they would have to be grappled with and considered on their merits. The landlord stiffened the fibres of his brain for the task.

One fact came uppermost. It would assert[166] itself; it refused to be blinked. Now that the King was indeed here in his inn, the utmost must be made of him. For was there not to a poor man a fortune in the royal person? To some people it might seem distasteful to sell the King; yea, even to him, Gamaliel Hooker, when he thought of it in cold blood, it did not seem a pleasant thing. It would have its compensations, though.

If, however, the King was to be taken in his house, he must act at once. He would be hardly likely to tarry. And yet he might. As Will Jackson, he had already stayed two days. He was probably waiting for his friends. Still, it would be by no means safe to count upon his remaining. There was yet one drawback to sending for the soldiers. When they came they would most certainly take away the wounded cavalier as well as the King. And Gamaliel had not yet had time to deprive him and his wife of their money and jewels. That was indeed a fly in the ointment. In a sense, it considerably lessened the price upon the head of the King.

[167]Still, it would be folly to risk losing the King’s price for the sake of a sum paltry by comparison. He would dearly like to grasp every penny. It was his nature; but in attempting to do so, he must not throw away the substance for the shadow. With a sudden access of resolution he called for his son.

“Joseph,” he said, in his lowest tone, “do you saddle the tit this minute. I want you to ride right away to Woolden Magna, and ask for Captain Culpeper at Master Parkin’s farm. You know it well. ’Tis on the top of Woolden Hill, overlooking the sea. And when you see Captain Culpeper, you are to whisper in his private ear: ‘The King, Charles Stuart, is at the “Sea Rover”; do you come at once.’”

“Hush, hush, thou fool!” said the nervous Gamaliel. “If we are overheard, we are undone.”

Turning round in his anxiety, he became aware that although Cicely the serving-maid[168] was ostensibly cleaning the warming-pan, she was really listening with all her ears.

“My wench,” said her master, sharply, “do you go into the cellar and broach that small barrel of October. I told ye to do so yesterday.”

When Cicely had disappeared to do his bidding, Gamaliel continued his instructions.

“Now, Joseph,” he said, in the same eager whisper as before, “you understand. You will do all this quickly and secretly, and your father’s fortune is made. But, Joseph, I think instead o’ saying to Captain Culpeper, ‘The King is at the “Sea Rover,”’ you had better say: ‘My father, Master Gamaliel Hooker, hath sent me to tell you that the King is at the “Sea Rover.”’ The Captain must understand that I sent ye, Joseph. But perhaps it would be better that I writ this information down on a piece of paper, and signed my name to it. Nobody can then take the credit of it from me.”

With this cunning end in view, he caused Joseph to procure him the materials for writing.[169] He thereupon committed the message to paper with much anxious care and many laborious twistings of the mouth. At last it was written and sanded, signed and sealed, and delivered into Joseph’s hand. Five minutes afterwards Joseph’s nag stood at the door, and Joseph himself was superintending Cicely whilst she put up for him a hunch of bread and cheese to bear with him for his dinner. Then it was that the landlord suddenly rose from his chair, and began anxiously to hobble about the kitchen. Just as Joseph had put the bread and cheese in his pocket, and was going out of the door, the landlord stayed him.

“Joseph,” he said, hoarsely, “give me back again the paper I have writ, and go and unsaddle the tit. We will let this matter bide a bit; I must think upon it.”

He had his fourth glass of hot rum-and-water to aid him to do so. He meditated upon the grave matter until his head was ready to split. He was taken with a vacillation that he had never experienced before. His natural instincts were all for betraying the King. There[170] lay his pecuniary advantage, and even his personal safety. Should it become known that he had harboured the man, knowing him to be the King, he was as good as dead. A hundred times he arrived at that plain, inevitable conclusion; yet a hundred times, at the very moment he was about to act, his resolution weakened, and then appeared to snap. Some strange tremor would arise in the remotest recesses of his brain.

The landlord did not know what name to put to it. Conscience it was not. He knew himself too intimately ever to bring such an accusation against the power of his understanding. Pity it was not. Fear it was not. It might be superstition, yet he hardly thought so. It was the oddest thing in life, and not the least disconcerting. It was his plain duty to himself to sell the King, and yet a vague scruple he was unable to define had the power to restrain him.

He reasoned with himself; he fought with himself. It was too monstrous that a chance which could never occur again could be allowed[171] to slip by. Long ago had he made up his mind what to do in the case of the King’s coming to his inn. And here was the King upstairs; and here was he going over the well-trodden ground again, reviewing all his settled conclusions, when every minute was of the first importance. Any moment the King might turn his back on the “Sea Rover” forever. Yes, he would cast out the qualm that was debasing his mind. It was sapping all its vigorous faculties. But try as he might, he could not do so. It was ingrained in the very marrow of his brain.

Minute by minute his chances were ticking away. Had he only had the strength of purpose to permit Joseph to start on his errand, he would have been halfway there by now! The malady that was besetting him had never come upon him before. It was the most singular he had ever experienced, or even heard of. It had already caused him to act in a manner for him unparalleled. To keep Joseph back for no cause whatever was, the poor landlord considered, the act of a madman. It was so entirely[172] opposed to reason; never before had he been blind to its dictates.

He called for his fifth glass of hot rum-and-water. By God! if he could not do it sober, he would do it drunk! To think that he was throwing away a fortune without the least reason for doing so! Again he got up and began to hobble unsteadily about the kitchen floor. He began to pant, to gasp; the sweat poured out of him, although the weather was still bitterly cold. Was he the master of his own mind, or was he not? That was what the whole thing amounted to. Had he lived to be sixty ere he put that question for the first time? But he would answer it.

Yes; he would answer it. He tossed off the sixth glass. The tremor was not quite so distinct in his brain. He felt a little stronger. He must stiffen every nerve of his resolution. Never mind the sweat shining on his forehead, his agitated breast, or his trembling flabby hands. He was slowly getting his teeth upon the bit; he was getting some control over this strange insanity.

[173]The seventh glass, and he triumphed. It was a hard-won struggle; none harder. But at last, as the shadows of the wintry evening came stealing down the rocks, and Cicely lit the first candle, the struggle came to an end. Each individual nerve in Gamaliel’s body rioted within him; he was as unsubstantial as pulp; but at last his resolution was running clear and strong. The little flickering tremor that had a thousand times routed it and put it to shame was now dead. Hot rum-and-water had ultimately done its business. The crisis was past. He was master of himself after all.

In a voice so hoarse it resembled the croak of a raven, he summoned his son a second time.

“Joseph,” he said, “I want you to go now. Go speedily. Time presses; the business is very urgent. And when you come to Captain Culpeper, tell him to make all haste. It is now a little after four o’clock; at a little after eight he and his men should be at the door. Be a good lad now. Do not tarry an instant, and your old father’s fortune is made, likewise your own.”

[174]Joseph listened to the low, excited utterance of the landlord in a purely mechanical manner. He was neither uplifted nor depressed; he was neither surprised nor disappointed. He took the sealed paper once more in his hands, and stepped out without a word into the sea-broken silence of the wintry evening. A little afterwards his horse was out of the stable, and he rode away.

The landlord still hobbled up and down the inn kitchen, until he heard the hoofs of the horse die away in the distance. He then sat down in his chair by the fireside for the first time for more than an hour. His head fell onto his chest. He was utterly worn out and overcome.

[175]

CHAPTER XII
The Mariner

JOSEPH once away on his errand, the landlord felt easier. He had no longer to fear his own irresolution. Things must take their course. Therefore, he sat down and waited through the weary hours, with a conviction steadily arising in his mind that after all he was playing a fine, a manly, not to say a noble, part. It calls[176] for no little courage to sell one’s king for a few pieces of money. Gamaliel, now he came to look back upon this transaction, or at least the inception of it, felt something perilously like pleasure glow within him. He did not glory in his deed as yet; but the fact that it had cost him so many pains to achieve, invested himself in his own mind with some attributes of the heroic.

Therefore he sat down to wait through the weary hours, very well content with himself. With other things he was hardly so. He was mortally afraid that the rare prize upstairs might quit his roof ere the soldiers came. Or his friends might intervene; or a thousand and one things, at present unforeseen, might happen. In any case the landlord was wholly a man of peace. Nothing did he desire less than there should be a scene of bloodshed on his kitchen floor. God forbid! The thought turned him cold. He had a constitutional aversion to blood. Not only did it make such a mess, but it also had a habit of lingering in the mind for many days to come. Besides, like[177] many men of brains, endowed with a great activity of imagination and intelligence, he clearly felt himself to be at a disadvantage in the presence of violence. He had no skill in the use of arms; he preferred to work with subtler weapons; and when he saw them flying about, he was apt to anticipate their consequences more keenly than another. He was not a coward; his great action of that evening, which would change the course of history, was a sufficient refutation of any charge of that sort; but in the matter of actual violence, that ignoble argument of inferior wits, he was not seen at his best.

He hoped to God that to-night there would be no blood spilt at his inn. His poor nerves still ticked in his head as loudly as the spider running up the wall. He was, indeed, very overwrought. He felt that it would be more than his body and soul could endure, should there be a scene of violence this evening in his house. He revolted from the thought. He did hope the young King would have the good sense to acquiesce passively in his fate when it[178] confronted him. He knew that there were two cases of pistols upstairs at least, not to speak of daggers. Probably the presence of a lady would restrain him.

Still, after all, kings were not in the habit of fighting, except on the field of battle. They were much too high up in the world for that. If the King’s numerous friends, who certainly were not a farther distance from the royal person than his safety rendered desirable, would only keep off till to-morrow, all would be well. If they turned up when the soldiers came, the distracted landlord was sure he should run out of the house and hide himself, even if he lost the King’s price thereby. To-night he felt very old and weak and overborne.

The time seemed interminable. It was as though the hands of the ruthlessly slow old clock in the corner would never go round. Five struck, and then six, without engendering much excitement in the landlord’s heart. The tardy passing of the minutes between six and seven, however, occasioned the first flutter in[179] his spirit. It was tentative mainly; the time for the furious beatings of his blood and the palsy of his limbs was not yet at hand.

At about twenty minutes to seven the first incident of that strange night occurred. The kitchen door was suddenly flung open, with never a “With your leave” or a “By your leave,” and a tall man entered. He was attired in a great hat, whose wide flapping brims were tied down over his ears and under his chin, doubtless that it might not fall a prey to the rude sea-wind; whilst a heavy cloak of a sanguine colour covered him from his neck to the calves of his legs, and left but a pair of extremely muddy riding-boots to be seen below. His voice was loud and high, and singularly penetrating. He addressed the landlord without the preface of any ceremony.

“Landlord,” he said, “you have lately taken a new servant-man into your service, I believe, who goes by the name of Jackson. I wish to see him.”

The landlord was full of tremors, but rum-and-water made him bold. This was doubtless[180] a friend of the King, come to take his Majesty away into a safer seclusion.

“The man Jackson is no longer in my service, sir,” said the landlord, shortly. Even as he uttered this, he thought it rather happy, it had the merit of being perfectly true.

“When did he quit it?” asked the tall man, striving to conceal his excitement.

“How odd!” said the other. “Did he give a reason for his departure, and did he say whither he was going?”

“He was dismissed my service, sir,” said the landlord, with the inspiration of his rum-and-water. “His ways were not my ways, d’ye see, and he had to go. Not only was he the worst serving-man I have ever had, but I had occasion to doubt his truthfulness, not to say his honesty.”

“Ah! yes, yes, to be sure!” said the visitor, with a remarkable admixture of laughter and[181] amazement. “How very odd, how very odd; ’od’s fish, how very odd! But, after all, you were his master.”

All this time he was fervently hoping that his unwelcome visitor would go, lest anything should happen to detain him. Whoever he was, he was determined that the King should not see him if he could help it. Charles was at present perfectly settled and quiet upstairs, and he seemed likely to remain so for some time to come if nothing occurred to disturb him. If possible, he must see nobody ere he saw Captain Culpeper and his men.

The strange visitor, still repeating “How odd; ’od’s fish, how very odd!” in various inflections of tone, was preparing to take his departure, when the particular thing occurred that the landlord so desired to avert. The stairs began to creak, and the King’s long legs were observed to be coming down them.

“My dear Colonel,” said the King, heartily, “I thought I could not be mistaken in your[182] voice. It penetrated upstairs to my chamber, and I judged by the sound of it that our landlord was putting you off. I was half expecting you to-night.”

The visitor greeted the King in the curious manner that the singular circumstances demanded. While he contrived to throw a vast amount of respect into his demeanour, he shot a number of questioning glances from the King’s face to that of the landlord. Plainly he was wishing to be advised of how much Gamaliel actually knew concerning the King’s identity.

“The murder is out,” said the King, laughing. “There are no longer any secrets between Boniface and ourselves.”

“Then, Sire,” said the Colonel, “permit me to say that I think mine host to be a very honest fellow. Landlord, you did well to conceal the whereabouts of the King from one who was a total stranger to you. You exercised a rare discretion, landlord, and I am sure his Majesty will not be in the least likely to forget it.”

“By my faith! yes,” said the King, heartily;[183] and then added frankly: “After all, I believe I have done less than justice to our Boniface.”

The landlord bowed low. His ears tingled to hear his praises sung. He felt it to be a somewhat ironical world, however. The sweat burst out of the roots of his hair; he knew what Judas Iscariot felt like, of old, when he sat at the Last Supper.

“Sire,” said the visitor, “all the arrangements are made and the coast is clear. I am assured that there are no Roundheads nearer than Woolden Magna, a hamlet some fifteen miles along the coast. To-night, therefore, under the cover of the darkness, you will be able to push on to Titcomb Place, the house of Mr. John Pocock. You will there be able to lie in a better security. You will be able to wash your face, Sire, and adopt a raiment less out of keeping with your condition.”

“My present one is by no means out of keeping with my condition, Colonel,” said the King, with a sudden bitterness. “The condition of a dog is that of a gentleman by comparison.”

“A little patience, Sire,” he said gently. “In a few short days you will no longer have need to fear your enemies. I would recommend, Sire, that you come with me now to Titcomb Place. It is but three miles along the rocks, and we must go on foot. I have brought no horses, as the way is devious. Mr. Pocock hath everything in readiness for your reception, and I am sure, Sire, you will lie in perfect comfort and security for one night at least.”

The landlord hung upon the King’s reply. After all, was he to be balked by the King’s going ere the soldiers could reach him?

“My dear Colonel,” said the King, with his customary diffidence, “not to-night, I think. I am in no mood to leave my quarters here. I am perfectly snug and content; and as you say, our Boniface hath already given an earnest of his honesty. Besides, we have had more than enough of the night air of late. This evening we propose to give ourselves a holiday. Despite our attire and the walnut juice that discolours[185] our countenance, we have a warm and snug chamber at our disposal upstairs, and the society is most amiable. My poor young Lord Farnham lies there of a bullet wound, a memorial of the melancholy Third, and his adorable Countess is there to nurse him.”

“Ah, Sire!” said the Colonel, wagging a playful finger at the King. “Further argument of mine is superfluous, I fear. Mr. Pocock cannot hope to compete with my Lady Farnham. And, after all, Sire, I do not think it matters greatly where you lie this evening. The enemy do not seem to be very active in this neighbourhood. Landlord, you have no reason to fear their appearance to-night, I trow?”

“I do not think, sir, that they are at all likely to inconvenience his Majesty to-night,” said the landlord.

His voice was prompt, hard and dry. He hoped God would forgive him. But, after all, he was a poor man; he was not a personal friend of the King’s; and he had never pretended to a particular interest in the species.

“Very well, Sire, we will leave it at that,”[186] said the Colonel. “I will return here early to-morrow morning, and, if all is well, I will then conduct you to Titcomb Place.”

“Excellent, my good Colonel,” said the King, accompanying the most faithful friend of his wanderings, Colonel Francis Wyndham, to the kitchen door. He waved a frank adieu to him as he departed into the night. The King then returned upstairs.

The landlord breathed again. Having seen the end of that matter, he looked at the clock. It was now five minutes past seven. Say one hour more, if all went well. One short hour, and the agony of his suspense would be at an end. Nay, not that; rather it would be coming to its heat and violence. The full force of it would be when the men he had sent for were face to face with the persons upstairs.

He could hardly endure that thought. The nearer the time approached, the more certain the landlord became that it was going to be a terrible business. On his life he was not a coward, but another evening of this kind and he felt he must inevitably become one. Before[187] God, he was not a coward, but the manner in which his wild heart beat up into his throat was enough to choke him.

He could not sit still. He rose from his chair and went hobbling up and down the kitchen as before. All his physical infirmities had gone out of him. They had been replaced by those of his mind. He said again he was no coward; but he was certain that in his present shaken state anything might happen to him. If those soldiers began to whirl their pikes or discharge their pieces, or the woman began to scream, or particularly if he saw so much as a drop of blood, he must run forth out of the house, and hide his eyes and his ears until all was over. It was a pity that soldiers were concerned in the business at all. They were so ruthless; their wicked profession left them absolutely destitute of a sense of delicacy. He had always had a rooted aversion to soldiers.

It was now twenty minutes past seven. The wretched clock in the corner seemed to stand still. His heart ticked out the minutes, but the clock in the corner seemed to refuse to record[188] them. Its inaction mocked him. Still, after all, he was not sure he was not relieved to find the hour was not later. He was not fit to grapple with the worst. A respite was not unwelcome.

At this moment there came a knock on the kitchen door. The landlord inwardly cursed his visitor, whoever he might be. This was not a night for visitors. There had been one already; a pretty undesirable one, too. True, he had proved more than a match for him; with this one he must prove the same. Still, it was a little unreasonable for anyone short of Captain Culpeper, who, to be sure, would not have stayed to knock, to obtrude himself at such a crisis in his life—nay, at such a crisis in the destiny of nations.

Filled with the unction of his previous success, the landlord hobbled boldly to the door and opened it. The apparition waiting upon the threshold seemed to have stepped bodily out of one of Gamaliel’s wildest nightmares. It was the elderly mariner in the dogskin cap. There he stood, with the earrings in his ears;[189] the same malignant, humorous leer in his face. The scar across it shone white in the brightness of the kitchen fire; the naked knife at his waist was shining too. And, above all, his two great brown paws looked more knotted and gnarled than ever.

With no better invitation, the sailor lurched into the kitchen, assumed a seat by the fire, as on the previous occasion of his coming, and asked for a go of rum. The landlord ordered the serving-maid to bring it to him. The sailor tasted it deliberately when it was given to him, warmed his hands, and then cocked his one ugly eye across at the landlord. In spite of himself Gamaliel shivered. His awe of this rude mariner was in the last degree absurd; but there it was. His native delicacy was doubtless too great for him to be entirely at his ease in the society of these rude characters.

[190]“I am here, mate, about that young man I mentioned to ye the other evenin’,” said the mariner. “Have ye seen him yet?”

In an instant the landlord, afraid as he was of this fellow, arrived at the conclusion that his presence in that house was not at all required. The sooner he was quit of him the better. The young man he sought might very possibly be upstairs; he might prove to be either my Lord Farnham or the King; but things were very well as they were. This Diggory Fargus could not improve them; he might very possibly undo them though.

“I have seen no young man,” said Gamaliel shortly. “And I don’t much want to see one. This is a peaceable and honest inn.”

“I never said it weren’t,” said the mariner. “But have you had any comp’ny, mate, these three days?”

“Then, mate,” said the mariner, spitting[191] freely amongst the logs on the hearth, “you’re a liar.”

That was so trite a fact to Gamaliel, that he did not attempt to contradict it. He was not a little disconcerted by it, however.

“Now I’ll tell ye, mate, how I know ye’re a liar,” said the sailor, with a slow anger that made him far more formidable than an outburst would have done. “The candles are comin’ through the chinks in the shutters of that front chamber over the sign. Perhaps ye’ll tell me that that don’t mean comp’ny; but in any case Diggory Fargus is a-going up to look with his own blessed deadlight, and ye can lay to that, mate.”

Without condescending to parley further with the landlord, who had plainly none of his confidence, Diggory Fargus got up from the fire and lurched to the stairs.

“What are you about, man?” said the landlord excitedly. “It is no place for you, up there! There are lords and ladies up there.”

“I knew you were a liar,” said the grimly satisfied mariner. “Lords and ladies, is they?[192] Well, like as not, that’s just who I’ve come to see. What moight be their names, mate?”

The landlord, seeing that it was hopeless to throw more dust in the shrewd sailor’s eye, submitted with the best grace he could summon.

“My Lord Farnham, is there?” said the sailor. “Well, mate, I calls that sing’lar, seein’ as how my Lord Farnham is the very young man I’m wantin’.”

He had lost the game; but he spoke as cheerfully and obligingly as he could, for he was keenly desirous to propitiate this ugly devil of a mariner. Besides, one sailor more or less did not matter much at this stage. The time was growing very short. The hoofs of the soldiers’ horses would soon be heard on the road. Diggory Fargus or ten Diggory Farguses would then be of no avail.

The landlord put his best leg foremost, and led the sailor up the rickety stairs to the[193] chamber where the King sat in the society of the Earl of Farnham and his Countess. He knocked a little timidly upon the door.

“If it please your Majesty and your lordship and your ladyship,” said the landlord, putting his nose on his belly again, deeming that etiquette demanded it of him, “there is here a sailor-man to see my lord.”

“Which be my Lord Farnham, mate?” said the mariner, addressing the King bluffly. He was a plain man himself, and the landlord’s elaborate flummeries rather increased the directness of his manners.

“Are you the master of the little vessel that Colonel Phelips promised to engage for my lord?” asked Lady Farnham.

“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said the mariner. “She’ve been lying three days past in Pyler’s Cove, a short sea-mile up the beach. When I was here[194] a day or so agone, ye hadn’t touched this port. I should ha’ come last night again, but we couldn’t ha’ put to sea in sich a gale as that.”

“I was expecting you anxiously,” said Lady Farnham. “Indeed, so anxious did I become, that in the middle of the night I went forth to seek you, but saw you not.”

“I daresay I was under hatches then,” said the sailor. “But to-night at ten o’clock the wind and tide should be fair enough. We can get off then.”

“Oh! if you can, good sailor,” she exclaimed, impulsively, “I shall never be able to requite you.”

Even as she spoke, however, there came a thought that dashed it to the earth. There was her husband. He was too weak to move.

“My lord is stricken,” she said. “He cannot walk a step. What is to be done, good sailor?”

[195]“Don’t ye fret about that, ma’am,” he said. “Diggory Fargus hath run too many cargoes in precarious plazen to be beat by a thing like that. I’ll bring three o’ my mates along wi’ a litter, at half-past nine o’ the clock. We should be able to bear the gentleman easy if we takes our time.”

“At half-past nine of the clock then, good sailor,” said the lady, fervently. “And may God requite you for your services. We will be in readiness.”

Diggory Fargus pulled his forelock and went downstairs in the company of the nervous landlord.

“Oh, Sire,” said the poor lady—the tears were come into her eyes,—“it is indeed a providence that the sailor is here at such a time. Wilt thou not come with us, too? Something clearly told me that if you spent this night, Sire, under this roof, you would be ta’en.”

“Madam, you are more than kind,” said the King, complaisantly. “We will consider it.[196] Although we think we must not disappoint our other friends. They, too, have a boat chartered for us somewhere. But we shall see. On the one hand is our duty; on the other, our inclination.”

[197]

CHAPTER XIII
The Soldiers

WHEN the landlord had carefully and thankfully seen the sailor out of his house, he looked at the clock as one hardly daring to do so. It was still twenty minutes past seven. The landlord recoiled from it with a shock. He was in that state of tension which rejects the simple and natural. He was either dreaming a wild dream, or he was[198] face to face with the supernatural. In his present extreme condition, both seemed possible.

All at once it then occurred to Gamaliel that the clock had stopped. Whatever had come upon him? Of course it was Friday evening, and for the first time in forty years the hour for winding it up had gone by unheeded. Almost savagely, so moved by a contemptuous anger was the landlord against himself, he took the key in his feverish hands, and strove to wind it up and set it again in motion. His attempts were pitiful. The key refused to obey his faltering hand, and wandered all over the face of the clock. The palsy of terror was already communicated to his limbs.

The clock was wound at last. He set the pendulum again in motion, and it recommenced sonorously to tick. Even then, however, the landlord was no nearer the end of his suspense. He did not know how long the clock had stopped, and in all the house it was the only thing he had to tell the time by. Could anything have been more distracting or inopportune than his forgetfulness?

[199]By hook or by crook he must obtain the time. To be ignorant of it at that hour was more than flesh and blood could endure. He would go upstairs and ask the King.

In the greatest trepidation of body and spirit, he climbed the stairs. When he got to the top he stood irresolutely, with his knuckles poised against the chamber door. He felt that, even supposing the power was vouchsafed him to knock upon the panels, he would still be unable to address the King. His mouth was like a lime pit; his tongue stuck in it, no longer susceptible of control.

He was physically incapable of addressing the King. He would try to ask Lady Farnham. He knocked fiercely upon the door, for to do so with the deliberation of cold blood was impossible. He was bidden to enter.

The landlord did not know how he got into the chamber. He was certainly not conscious that it was by the agency of his feet. But suddenly he found himself staring wide-mouthed at his guests, with never a word to give them. They plainly expected one, yet his tongue[200] stuck in his mouth; he was unable to utter a syllable.

“Hath our Boniface seen a ghost?” said the King’s voice. “I declare he hath the pallor and inanimation of death without the peace of it. Speak, good fellow. What ails thee?”

The landlord quivered from head to foot, but speak he could not. The King’s voice was the last straw. He tottered back against the wall.

“Oh, what doth ail the poor man?” said the compassionate lady. “Look how his eyes stare, and see how the sweat pours from him! And he can scarce stand upon his legs. I am sure it is some grievous malady. Can it be poison, thinkest thou?”

The King’s voice was utterly too much for the landlord. His struggles to speak ended in his shaking a few harsh sobs out of his dry throat. He then began to whimper like a child.

[201]“I declare,” said the King, “I never saw anybody so overcome before. Something must be done for the poor fellow. I think we had better summon his son.”

The mention of his son’s name acted on the landlord in much the same manner as a spark upon a keg of gunpowder. The process of cause and effect was far too swift to be at all related in the unhappy Gamaliel’s subsequent consciousness; but almost before he recalled upon what errand his son had gone, his tongue was released, and words flowed from it in a torrent.

“The soldiers! the soldiers!” he cried. “The soldiers are coming, your Majesty!”

The landlord knew so little of what he was saying, that he was half stunned to find his three auditors looking at him so wildly.

In the circumstances, the King’s voice struck with such a peculiar languor upon Gamaliel’s ear, that it acted like a sedative upon his nerves. There never was a better illustration of the[202] force of example upon a weak mind. Had the King and his companions ranted and raved, and called for their cloaks and their horses, the landlord would inevitably have fallen upon his knees and craved forgiveness of them. Yet, startled as they were, since they still retained the composure of good breeding, and the young King, probably with some little bravado, heightened his natural diffidence because his own safety was involved, the landlord was acted upon powerfully by their demeanour. Their composure did much to soothe his agitation.

In any case, had they but known it, he was entirely at their mercy; to be swayed by them, at that instant, backwards and forwards like a reed in the wind. They chose to go backwards; involuntarily the landlord, with no longer the least control over his faculties, went backwards too.

“I—I think the soldiers are coming, your Majesty,” said the trembling landlord.

[203]“You think they are coming,” said the King. “Why should you think they are coming, landlord?”

There was the least tinge of amusement now added to the languor of the King’s tone. He pushed the traditional demeanour of a monarch, which had been in his family for generations, a point too far. Unconsciously, he was sealing his own fate by the unnatural tranquillity of his bearing. Slowly but surely his example was inciting the irresolute landlord to a better possession of himself.

“I—I thought I heard the sound of horses upon the road a minute since, as I sat by my kitchen fire,” said the landlord.

The frenzy was past. Gamaliel Hooker was beginning to speak again in his natural person. He was gradually becoming once more the master of his own mind.

Lady Farnham ran to the window. She pressed her ear upon it. Not a sound fell within the chamber; but all breathed heavily in an agony of listening. There was only the[204] never-ceasing voice of the breakers, beating against the wind and rocks.

“Plainly you were mistaken, landlord,” said the King, impassively. “But the great distress your fancies put you in was highly commendable to you. Your fears are groundless; but the new proofs they have furnished of your fidelity and good feeling towards us shall certainly not be forgotten. Landlord, we thank you.”

The landlord bent his white face. He had so much recovered himself, that as he backed out of the King’s presence he was able to say:

“It is now ten minutes after eight of the clock,” he said to Lady Farnham. “Your friends are coming for my lord at half-past nine. I think it will be well, dear lady, if we all sup here together in this chamber at nine[205] o’clock. We shall require a good meal, methinks; for many arduous passages may be before us all.”

“At nine o’clock then, Sire,” said the landlord, “it shall be laid in this chamber for three persons.”

The landlord closed the door and got himself below. His first action was to regulate the clock. Ten minutes past eight: the hour was at hand. The landlord stood in the middle of the kitchen listening; there was still only the sound of the sea. Then he heard the cry of a wild bird in the wintry night. But still the noise of horses came not.

Now that the frenzy of his madness was past, the landlord, in the reaction of it, felt that he had better control of himself. It was probably because his senses were numbed a little; the paralysis that had fallen upon them that morning when the King had first revealed his presence was coming upon them again. He was conscious of the same strange stupor creeping through his veins; but this time it was horrible. There was the nausea of the impending[206] to embitter it. The sensation it induced was not unlike that favourite form of nightmare of falling slowly down into space from some dizzy incredible height. He seemed to have been cut adrift from all that bound him to existence; he was being precipitated slowly, feet foremost, into the black gulf of the infinite yawning beneath him.

How slowly! The clock in the corner said twenty minutes past eight. The soldiers were already overdue; the landlord mechanically cursed them for not coming promptly. They could not know what tortures he had passed through during the last two hours, else they would never prolong them and draw them out. If they did not arrive soon to put him out of his misery, he was sure that another frenzy would come upon him. How sick, how weak, how impotent he felt now that he could dimly recall the recent scene before the King! There are times when a thing that has happened many a year ago—some small faux pas or other—will recur to the mind with a dim sense of bashful shame. At first the landlord was afflicted in[207] about the same degree; but as the minutes passed, it grew vastly stronger and more vivid, until in the end it became a whirling vertigo of self-disgust. The landlord loathed himself.

A coward, when he knows he is a coward, and would be otherwise, is not far removed from the most unfortunate man in the world. The landlord had lived sixty years before he had discovered how ignoble were the parts that composed the fabric of his character. For the first time they were confronted by a set of circumstances that would have taxed the resolution of the strongest mind to the utmost. The landlord had awakened—for he was a man cursed with a considerable degree of intelligence—to the fact that the materials out of which his mind was made were miserably inadequate to the present occasion. Something beyond self-love, greed, cunning, and an implacable egotism were demanded of him who aspired to act the leading part in the drama about to be played. He had sold his King, it was true; but his critical spirit told him how terribly he had bungled the tragic business.

[208]Five-and-twenty minutes to nine. No sounds of horses yet. The landlord might listen intensely, but the hope usurped the place of the deed; the soldiers did not come. He had forgotten to tell Cicely to prepare the King’s supper. Bah! he would want no supper. There was only twenty-five minutes, though. If those thrice-cursed soldiers did not come soon, he would be calling for it. Yea, and half an hour afterwards they would be too late. Diggory Fargus and his men were due at half-past nine. And when my Lord Farnham and his lady left his doors, the King would also go.

In the mood of that particular moment these thoughts were bitter. A moment before and a moment afterwards the landlord had half a hope that his message might miscarry, and that the soldiers would not come at all. It would be the loss of a fortune, it was true. But so extreme was the nausea of his weakness, that he felt unable to bear the brunt of all that must ensue.

The cries, the struggles, the prayers, the recriminations, the despair, and possibly the[209] blood, would they not be more than his manhood could endure! But at this instant he was fearful lest the delay should be the means of two prizes of great worth slipping out of his fingers. The King would escape, and the cavalier and his wife would go unchallenged. A fortune would be lost to him, and all because in the first place he had wavered. Had he but been the man that all his life he had thought himself, Joseph would never have been recalled, and the business would have been over an hour ago.

Ten minutes to nine. Would the soldiers never come! The landlord was resigning himself to his despair. He must tell Cicely to prepare the King’s supper. Never was a weak man so well punished for his dalliance. They would not be here in time; the King would escape.

As the chances of that contingency increased, and it looked more and more probable that the landlord would not after all have to pass through the most terrible ordeal of his life, greed, his ruling passion, reasserted itself.[210] He became the prey of the bitterest disappointment.

At five minutes to nine he was lamenting the loss of a fortune. Alas, they would be too late! He sat down in his fireside chair with a heavy sense of personal misfortune. He had sweated blood over this bitter business; and yet nothing had come of it. He had frightened the life out of himself; he had stripped his craven heart naked before the fierce eyes of his understanding; there were no longer unsuspected secrets existing between his brain and his spirit; and there was not to be a penny-piece to compensate him. He had lost a fortune. He had not taken the tide at the flood. The hesitation of his weakness had been fatal.

Three minutes to nine. There came sounds in the night suddenly. The landlord sprang up from his chair, and ran to the keyhole of the kitchen door. Horses!

Oh, God! they were coming, after all. His first thought was, not that they were coming in time to earn a fortune for him, but that they were actually coming, after all; and that the[211] moment of his agony was at hand. The wretched man clapped his hands to his ears; he could not bear to hear the sounds of their arrival. He fell half fainting into his chair. He covered his eyes; he buried his head in the cushions; his lips moved in a wild, inarticulate prayer. But he could not efface the things that were happening. The horsemen were pulling up under the sign.

[212]

CHAPTER XIV
The Divinity that doth hedge a King

Only too well could the people upstairs hear the sounds from the night that were frightening the landlord out of his wits.

“Mother of Jesu, be our guide!” cried the poor lady. A crucifix was in her hand. “Sire, whither canst thou flee?”

“It is too late for that, I[213] fear, my dearest lady,” said the King. “What we have anticipated for so many days hath come to pass.”

“No, Sire!” said the woman, wildly. “At all costs, you must get away. Flee, Sire; flee anywhere! They must not, they shall not find you here!”

“They are already arrived,” said the King, still in the complete possession of his composure. “They have ridden very fast; they are dismounting beneath the window even now. Do you not hear their harsh, loud voices? One can even catch the words they utter.”

“See! that is the chamber,” they heard the loudest voice of all exclaim, “with the light coming through the shutters. Now, do you watch back and front; spread out all round the house. D’ye hear me? Do you watch that window; ay, and do you watch the roof, too.”

The speaker was plainly the leader, and just as plainly was labouring under a great excitement. The King smiled his charming, melancholy smile.

[214]“I would have you dry your tears, dear lady,” he said. “I think we can all suffer this event with fortitude. It is hardly so terrible as it seems.”

“One man, and another one disabled and bedridden, cannot avail against a multitude,” said the King. “Besides, violence should never be resorted to in a lady’s presence, madam.”

The woman gazed distraught this way and that about the chamber. Again and yet again she cried out that the King should not be taken. The King laughed.

“There are but two places in which to hide, as I can see,” said he; “and I do not think either of them would afford us much protection. One is up the chimney; the other, under the bed.”

Already the clank of arms filled the kitchen below. Boots and spurs rang on the stairs. They were coming up.

[215]She ran to the door and turned the key in the lock. The King rose from his chair, still laughing. The act of the unhappy lady was that of a child. What could a frail piece of wood avail against a company of armed men? The door was tried and shaken.

“Oh, my King, my King!” the woman cried in her despair. “They must not, they shall not take you!”

She set her back against the door. The next instant the first shivering blow fell upon it from without. The lock started; the hinges groaned. A second blow and the door was open, and the woman was driven hard against the bed. But as the foremost man entered the chamber she turned upon him, and made as if to thrust him back. Neither he nor those behind him heeded her, however. They pressed inexorably forward into the room.

The King stood awaiting them with an absolute indifference, as though he were hardly conscious of their presence, let alone their errand. He did not speak and he did not move.[216] Indeed, so unconcerned did he appear, that his features seemed to relapse into those of Will Jackson. They grew utterly blank and destitute of emotion; and this, in unison with his dirty, stained countenance and mean dress and appearance, caused the first of the soldiers to enter the room, Captain Culpeper, hardly to regard him at all.

He turned to the man in the bed. The face of Lord Farnham, worn with illness as it was, and racked with pain, betrayed the strong excitement under which he was labouring. His dress and the manner in which he lay were far more calculated to attract attention to him than the King, whose garb and impassivity were wonderful foils to his true condition.

For a moment Captain Culpeper, who apparently was not at all familiar with the King’s appearance, looked at Lord Farnham a little doubtfully, and in that moment Lady Farnham’s strange resolve was born.

As a cat notes the movements of a mouse, had the unhappy lady noted those of the King’s enemies. Of so vastly different a nature was[217] she to the helpless landlord downstairs in the kitchen, that in lieu of his paralysis at the approach of the terrible crisis she had a preternatural keenness in all her faculties. Her mind was perfectly clear, whatever the stress under which it was labouring. Her wits were roused to a desperate acuteness. Her whole being was possessed and dominated by one awful thought. The King’s life was at stake; the King’s life must be saved.

The soldiers did not move an inch but what the lady saw them. An instant of indecision and she was prepared to act upon it.

Captain Culpeper looked doubtfully a moment at Lord Farnham lying in the bed. The next, and the woman had flung herself passionately forward and buried her head beside him among his pillows.

“Oh, my King, my King!” she cried, putting her arms about her husband’s neck. “It were better you had died rather than this. It is indeed the end!”

The soldiers stood off respectfully. The grief of the woman was so piteous, that it[218] pierced even their rude souls. Lady Farnham continued to weep convulsively upon her husband’s neck, calling him by the King’s name, and pouring forth the cries of her despair. Captain Culpeper, who had never seen Charles, and had only the vaguest ideas of what he was like, did not suspect that the real King stood, in a servant’s livery, behind him. The woman’s actions in those tragic circumstances were so in keeping with them, and to the unpractised eyes of the soldiers the man in the bed was the only person in the room who could in the least fulfil their ideas of what a monarch was like, that the deception, once it was set up, was not difficult to maintain.

Charles, with an alertness of mind that seldom forsook him, grasped the scheme as soon as the woman’s first words were uttered. He prepared to do his part when the chance arose. If he could only get through the throng of soldiers filling the room, the stairs, the kitchen below, and the inn entrance, without exciting a breath of suspicion, all was not yet lost. As he stood hemmed in at present, the feat appeared[219] impossible. But fortune had already taken a strange turn: he was as yet unrecognised; he must maintain the demeanour of the carefully trained, impassive servitor. Therefore, while the lady bewailed his fate and clasped her husband in her arms, and the abashed soldiers stood off a little to permit her to do so, he neither spoke a word nor moved a limb, but kept well behind the Captain with respectful solicitude of bearing.

Lord Farnham, who was not so nimble of wit as his wife and Charles, was at first quite bewildered by the woman’s behaviour. Then, in a flash it came into his heart that it was to save the King. She was prepared to sacrifice the lives of them both that that of the monarch might be spared. The thought was no sooner in his mind than it changed his blood into fire. As the arms of his wife clung closer about his neck, he grew possessed with only one aspect of what was required of him. She was calling on him to save the life of the King at the cost of his own.

He was called on to give his own life for that[220] of the one man in the world he feared and hated most. In that first brief instant of time, Charles Stuart was not the King to him, but the man who had dared to come so boldly between him and the woman he adored. It was asking too much of flesh and blood.

Lord Farnham’s hatred of the King was so fierce, so active, so intense, that in despite of his wife’s example, he strove to open his lips to denounce him—to denounce him who had set poison into his soul simply to while away an idle moment. But even as he was wrenched in the grip of his desperate jealousy, he saw the King’s face.

It was regarding him with the same stoical calm as when he had raised his pistol an hour or two before to fire upon it. The same look of slightly amused indifference he thought he saw lurking in the eyes, and creeping round the lips. The King had looked into his heart, and, shrugging his shoulders at the drunken demon he encountered there, had bidden him to do his worst.

Again the King’s face had been too much[221] for his mad purposes. Before his lips could form the words of betrayal, the resolve died stillborn in his heart. With the King gazing upon him, it was useless to attempt to utter them. He must lie there passively, and acquiesce in the deceit that had for its object the sparing of the King’s life and the sacrifice of his own.

Nay, he must do more than acquiesce in it. He must assist it; he must promote it by every means in his power. For was not this hateful man his King? Was he not the representative of all that three generations of his family had recklessly spent their possessions and their blood upon? Was he not the symbol—he, the dirty-faced man in the mean clothes—upon which the gold, the tears, and the very lives of hundreds of the noblest and proudest in the land had been lavished? And yet he, a mere youth, was prepared to forego the first duty taught him by his father, the father who had yielded up his life that he might teach it with the better authority, that of fidelity to the King, simply because his Majesty, overcome[222] by the beauty of his wife, had gloried in the fact.

He was perfectly sane now. The fever of his insanity had lasted less than a minute. The man was his King; and where his sacred Majesty was concerned, no man had a right to think of himself. As suddenly as he had given way to his furious hate, he now became intoxicated by the King’s divinity. As long as a breath remained faithful to his body, so must he remain faithful to his sovereign. He must thank his God upon his knees, humbly, that it was given to him to render even the smallest service to his King.

He must aid his wife in her strange, mad, heroic efforts. The spirit to conceive, to act, and to accomplish thrilled through his weak frame. His lips grew articulate; his voice took a new tone, one wholly strange to himself and even to those who were familiar with it.

Very gently he unclasped the arms of his wife from about his neck. He then turned to[223] the eagerly-listening soldiers with a grave, sad smile, which yet had a delicate courtesy in it that insensibly disarmed them with its charm.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I pray you be a little patient with us. We are even now but recovering from a memorial we bore upon our person of the melancholy Third. Be a little patient, I pray you, gentlemen, and we will hope to rise from our couch when we have recovered of ourselves a little, and greet you more formally.”

Captain Culpeper bowed humbly. Few men can look upon a King unmoved; and a monarch in his last extremity may receive even the consideration of his enemies.

“I beg you, Sire,” said the soldier, in a broken voice, “that you will not submit your person to the least inconvenience. We find you so weak and stricken, Sire, that we earnestly pray that to-night you will not attempt to discompose yourself on our account.”

“You are more than kind, sir,” said the man in the bed; “a courteous enemy, indeed. But we will rise and endeavour to extend a little[224] courtesy unto you and these gentlemen, as is your merit.”

The words were excellently spoken. They had a dignified grace, and, above all, by some strange trick that the occasion had invoked, the incomparable melancholy that might be expected to proceed from the lips of the unfortunate King. The illusion was perfect. There was no longer any need for the soldiers to look about in uncertainty for the King, now that the man in the bed had spoken. His tones were unmistakable.

Charles, however, was no nearer escape than he was before. He was still hemmed in, in the middle of the chamber, by the press of soldiery. Some pretext must be found upon which he would be allowed to go thence. But the least excitement of their suspicions must be avoided, or he would be inevitably detained. And every moment that he loitered now was fraught with the highest danger. Their great fear was the landlord. They had reason to think him faithful, but not too liberally endowed with wit. Should he appear in the chamber entirely[225] ignorant of the deceit that was being practised, he was quite likely to commit some gross blunder by which the King would be discovered. And, too, there was always the fear that some soldier, better informed than his companions, might recognise the King in spite of his disguise and the trick his friends were practising for his benefit.

Some means of exit must be provided for him at once, lest one of these untoward things should happen. It was again the woman’s indomitable wit that provided the stratagem. She rose from the couch as if endeavouring to be calm at the express command of the King. The efforts she made to control her emotion were visible to all.

“Sire,” she said to the man in the bed, “although you have signified your intention of rising from your couch of sickness, I fear your Majesty will not be able to do so until you have drunk of that cordial the apothecary of Charmouth gave you. It is in your Majesty’s saddlebag, is it not, hanging in the stable?”

Lord Farnham saw at once the significance[226] of this. He had the wit to grasp in which direction the ruse was leading.

“It is well thought on, madam,” he said. “And, indeed, now you speak of it, I shall be hard put to, to rise without it. It were well if you sent Jackson to procure it for us.”

“Jackson,” said Lady Farnham, “you remember where we left his Majesty’s cordial. It is lying in one of the saddlebags in the stable.”

Jackson bowed gravely in assent, without uttering a word, the model of a well-trained serving-man.

“Sir,” said the lady, addressing Captain Culpeper, “will you allow this man to get the cordial for the King? I am afraid his Majesty will find it very needful.”

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the soldier, eagerly. “Sergeant, tell them to make way there for the King’s servitor. Also those on the stairs; and do you see that they do so.”

[227]

CHAPTER XV
“Way there for the King’s servitor”

THE King obediently began to move with stolid precision towards the chamber door. First one soldier stood back to let him pass; and then another; and then another. He walked through the door of the crowded chamber. With the same grave, steady, mechanical gait he reached the stairs.

“Way there,” said the[228] officious Sergeant, behind him, “for the King’s servitor!”

With keen looks of curiosity, the men besieging the rickety old stairs found a passage for him somehow, through which he contrived to squeeze the royal person. His clothes and his body pressed against their pistols and their breast-pieces; their breaths saluted his face; but step by step he came down into the kitchen.

The kitchen was hardly so thronged as the stairs. There was one man in it, however, who might undo all. From his chair in the chimney corner peered the landlord’s astonished face.

The landlord was huddled in his chair, as pale as death. His face was drawn and hideous; his eyes were half closed, and the eyeballs had shrunk to such a degree that they seemed to be buried in his head. But when the King came down the stairs, and the great voice of the Sergeant heralded his approach, Gamaliel[229] wrenched his eyes open and sat up in his chair. He was startled and unstrung. The whole thing was too vivid for a dream, and yet it was impossible. These soldiers had come expressly to fetch the King; and here was the King walking unmolested out of their hands.

It was surely the King. There was his long, shambling form, his loose limbs, his breeches and jerkin of leather, his impassive countenance. Yes, it was the King looking at him, the landlord. Sure, there was a half-amused gleam come upon the King’s face suddenly; and, see, he had set a finger to his lips. He was demanding silence of him.

The old man knew, as he sat in his chair, that the King was escaping, and that his own fortune was slipping away. He was perfectly conscious of these two overmastering facts; he sat in the full possession of his faculties. He had only to speak the word and the prize he had sweated blood to secure was his. The word must be spoken.

The King, ever with his slow, regulated,[230] mechanical tread, was passing through the men standing inside and outside the kitchen door.

The landlord opened his swollen lips, but his tongue had not the power to move. The veins rose in his forehead into great distended knots; he struggled frantically. The moment of a lifetime was passing; the King was escaping, and Gamaliel Hooker knew it. One word—oh, God! only just one little word, and the King would not go!

The man’s breath croaked and sobbed in his throat convulsively; but nothing human was heard from his lips. The King had passed out of the door; the officious Sergeant had escorted him through the last of his men, and, having done so, was returning with his head in the air, in a truly martial and self-satisfied manner. The landlord turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; his fingers clutched the air; the veins in his forehead continued to rise, until it seemed that they must break through the bloodless skin of his forehead; his voice came at last in an indistinct croak.

[231]The landlord’s extraordinary appearance drew the attention of the Sergeant.

“Yes, the King; what of him?” said the Sergeant. “He is lying on his bed upstairs.”

[232]

CHAPTER XVI
The departing Guests

THE Sergeant unloosed the landlord’s coat and ordered one of his men to procure water and dash it in his face. But Gamaliel had gone too far to be brought round easily, and the time spent in restoring him to his senses was the King’s deliverance.

Presently the landlord opened his eyes and looked about him. The reaction[233] brought with it a full measure of consciousness, and with it a command of his faculties. He could think; and, now it was too late, the power of speech was again vouchsafed to him.

“The King went out at that door!” he cried. “The King is escaped! That was the King you conducted to the door.”

“What do you mean?” demanded the astonished Sergeant. “Speak, clown and fool that you are! I tell you the King is upstairs.”

The landlord had now the power to unbosom his soul; and there was such a singular fervour of conviction in his words, that the soldier, vividly impressed by them, and bewildered by them too, made all haste up the stairs to Captain Culpeper, who, as he supposed, was still attending on the King.

The thoroughly alarmed and uneasy Sergeant came to him at the side of the bed, and recited the landlord’s story.

His heart sank with an overmastering foreboding that the landlord had spoken the truth.[234] He had not known the King when he entered the chamber, never having set eyes upon his Majesty before; and none of his men knew him either—they had only hearsay to guide them. Could it be that he was the victim of a trick. He turned furiously upon the man in the bed and the woman beside him.

“My God!” he said, “you have duped me; you have deceived me. The King’s servitor was the King. You have been playing a part.”

The man and the woman looked at him defiantly. Every instant they could maintain their rôles was of the utmost advantage to the fugitive; and in any case their own lives were forfeit.

“What do you mean?” said young Lord Farnham, striving to enact the comedy to the bitter end.

The truth had burst upon Captain Culpeper with stunning force. He saw it all. He became as one beside himself. He stamped, he[235] raved, he swore. They had allowed the prize actually to slip away when their hands were upon it.

The King must be pursued. They must pursue him hot-foot. Up hill and down dale, over the rocks, into the very jaws of the sea they must hunt the royal fugitive. He had but ten minutes start of them, and he was on foot.

No, he was not on foot. It seemed that he had taken a horse from the stable and had ridden away. Those who saw him do so believed that he had the Captain’s permission, as he was said to be on some errand of his Majesty lying upstairs.

The Captain gnashed his teeth. He drove his men out of the room before him like a flock of sheep. There was not a precious instant to lose. They must get to horse. Dark as it was, they must scour every yard of the surrounding country. There never was such a noise and a rattle as, with that, these soldiers fled down the stairs and forth of the kitchen door.

“To horse, to horse; the King is escaped!”[236] was the cry that rang out to the rocks by the side of the sea. Horses stamped under the signboard of the “Sea Rover”; boots, spurs, and stirrups struck one against the other; bridles shook; hoarse commands were given; the cavalcade moved fiercely and swiftly away.

Now that the crisis was past, the landlord was sufficiently master of himself to watch them go from his door. After this fiasco it was highly necessary, he argued, that he should do all he could to win their favour and their confidence. Captain Culpeper, despite the rage and excitement under which he was labouring, called out as he sprang to the saddle:

“Landlord, I charge you to detain the man and the woman upstairs against my return, on the peril of your life. I hold you already responsible for the King’s escape. Do you watch over these two persons, therefore, yet more jealously. I cannot spare any of my men to look after them, but you have your son and that strapping servant-girl. We will fetch them as soon as maybe, and lodge them in greater security.”

[237]While the last of these words were being uttered, Captain Culpeper and his troops were riding away. Stunned by their import, the landlord went within and closed the door. It was as though he had heard the sentence of his own death, for he knew it was wholly out of his power to detain the man and the woman upstairs should Diggory Fargus only prove true to his appointment. The sailor had promised to come, in the company of three of his friends, at half-past nine, to bear away the lady and her stricken husband.

If they came, what an irony it was to suppose that he, his son Joseph, and Cicely, the serving-maid, could possibly prevail against the redoubtable mariner and three of his pirates or his smugglers!

As a preliminary measure, the landlord locked the door. Not only did he lock it, but he bolted it at the top and at the bottom, and ran the chain across. Then he looked at the clock. Ten minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus had promised to come at half-past nine. Probably he had purposely held off when he saw[238] that the soldiers were at the inn. He even might have had so tender a regard for his own skin as to go back again. God grant that that were so! He even might not have meant to come at all. The landlord prayed with all his soul that Diggory Fargus and his men might not appear. The loss of the King was effaced for the time being from his mind by this new matter.

The security of his own person was involved in it, and the immunity of that sacred thing was of even greater moment to Gamaliel than the loss of a King’s ransom. All his life he had had a holy dread of violence. God in heaven be merciful to him a sinner, and keep away that ruthless sailor!

The landlord looked at the clock again. Five minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus was already twenty-five minutes behind his time. But there was hardly any comfort in the thought. Hours must elapse ere Captain Culpeper could come to his aid, unless by a miracle the King were retaken immediately. A little bitterly the landlord reflected that miracles did[239] not happen to him. Was not his life stern, terrible, inexorable matter of fact? At least, it seemed so then.

The landlord fell once again to his principal occupation of that tragic day. He began to hobble up and down the kitchen, with ever and anon an anxious eye for the clock.

There might be hours of this form of torture. If there were, Gamaliel felt that surely he must go out of his mind. It was a suspense to which there would be no end. There was no limit to the hour at which Captain Culpeper might return to claim the two persons left in his custody. It might be an hour, or it might be twelve; it might be a day, a week, or a month. But be that as it may, his instructions were perfectly clear. He must detain those two guilty persons at his inn, by force, if necessary, or he would forfeit his life.

The first stroke of ten had barely struck, when the landlord caught a sound that froze the blood in his veins. The noise of persons on foot coming down the bridle-path rose above the distant roar of the sea. He heard rough[240] voices. The kitchen door was tried; a lusty smack was delivered upon it.

The landlord did not stir. He leant against the wall for support; he had not the strength of a mouse.

A terrific blow shook the lusty oak. Still the landlord leant sickly against the wall.

The lady appeared at the head of the stairs, cloaked, masked, and gloved for a journey. Hearing that her deliverers were at hand, she ran down the stairs, and, not heeding the helpless landlord, thrust back the bolts, the chain, and the lock of the kitchen door.

The mariner and three companions as rude and ill-favoured as himself stepped out of the night.

“We’re behind our time, ma’am,” said Diggory Fargus; “but, d’ye see, at half-past nine we had to tack and go about, for the place was full of soldiers. We supposed they had come[241] to take ye, but we thought it our dooty to return and satisfy ourselves.”

“God requite you, sailor,” said the woman, fervently. “My husband is still upstairs. But let us make all haste, for at any moment his enemies may return upon him.”

Even as the woman spoke, the pale figure of a man tottered down the stairs. Clinging tightly to the rail, he put one weak limb before the other and reached the kitchen before they had observed him. He too was fully accomplished for the journey.

“Oh, mine own,” said the woman, tenderly, “what a foolish valour! ’Tis ever the same headstrong, wilful, heedless fellow. Did I not order you to stay upstairs until we fetched you? Thou art much too weak to use thine own legs as yet, lad.”

“Peace, Patsy woman,” said the young man. “If I can walk into this accursed place, I can walk out of it. I am hale and strong by comparison with what I was when I came here with the bullet in my side. Landlord, give me a cup of wine, and I shall be fit to encounter[242] the perils of the sea. Deuce take me! what hath happened to the landlord?”

As pale as linen, his eyes staring and his knees knocking, the landlord still clung in silence to the wall. Diggory Fargus looked at him grimly. Lying in concealment close at hand when the soldiers rode away, he had overheard the injunctions of Captain Culpeper.

“The Cap’n left particular orders,” said the mariner to the lady, “that this ’ere son of a rum puncheon was to hold you and your mate, ma’am, against his return, by force, if necessary. And as it goes agen his principles to use violence o’ any sort, he’s asking of himself, d’ye see, whether ye would take it amiss if he invited you to tarry.”

The woman looked at the landlord. None had had a fairer opportunity of judging his character than she during her sojourn in that place. Her eyes shone through her mask; the stern lines fell about her mouth; and then she turned away from him with the same tremor of disgust as one turns away from a venomous[243] reptile. Even to her compassion there was a limit.

“Come, my own,” she said. “It is folly in us to lose a precious moment. I wonder what hath happened to the poor King. God be with him, poor lad, this night!”

“He should make good his escape,” said Lord Farnham. “He hath a horse and a full ten minutes start of his foes.”

Leaning on the arm of his wife he passed slowly out of the door, into the night and his freedom. The landlord still leant against the wall: not a word did he speak; not a finger did he lift to stay the departing guests.

Diggory Fargus tarried behind an instant to speak a word in the landlord’s ear.

“Mate,” said he, thrusting his one eye into the quivering face of the landlord, “I said, if ye played me false I would twist your head off your body with these two hands. But I shall leave it to others, d’ye see. I shall kind o’ leave it to my deppities. They’ll make a cleaner job of it than me. They’ll do it more formal and more lawyerlike. Besides, I have[244] hardly the time to do it now. But let me tell ye, mate, as one man to another, that when next I am around this coast, I shall make a call at this old grog shop, and if I find that them there soldiers has not done their dooty by you, ye can lay to it as Diggory Fargus is a christened man he’ll keep his word. A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate.”

The sailor spat vehemently upon the kitchen floor, and lurched out into the darkness in the wake of his companions.

[245]

CHAPTER XVII
The Landlord

GAMALIEL closed the door upon the last of his visitors. Gradually their slow footsteps receded into the roar of the sea. He listened, and fancied he could hear them long after he had ceased to do so. Insensibly his mind lingered on their sound, for when they should die away he knew that his life was at an end.

[246]As one who has suffered the tortures and paroxysms of a disease may lose his agonies as soon as it develops mortal symptoms, so the landlord, possessed with the knowledge that his own life was the price he must pay for his weakness, sat down in his chair by the fire with a clear mind. There was no longer any need for him to torment himself. He foresaw the issue as plainly as the man in the cart when he looks upon the scaffold.

He had lost all. Events had been too great for his second-rate character. They had called for a strong man—a man of courage, of indomitable spirit and tenacity of purpose—to grapple with them. For such a one there had been a fortune. The landlord, self-deceived because all his life he had never been put to the test, had attempted to bend them to his own purposes. But they had proved too great and unwieldy; he had not had the physical strength to overcome them. Instead they had overcome him.

The landlord did not give himself up to despair. He was too far gone for that. He[247] was bitterly afraid of death. A death by violence would still have the power to revolt him; but the thing uppermost in his mind was his humiliation. It was so fierce and overpowering, that it became an anodyne to lull and allay all the passions of his soul. It took the sting out of death itself. He had been tried and found wanting. At the age of sixty the supreme moment of a laborious and fairly successful life had come. He had failed; let him perish.

“Finis” was about to be written to his history. He had no longer to fear that awful suspense which had the power to overthrow the firmest intelligence. As plainly as he could hear the roar of the sea, he saw his doom. He sat still and thought upon it, almost calmly. Right at the very last he had emerged from the furnace, and had come out strong.

He would bare his neck, and they should do their worst. He would welcome it. He had no desire to live now; he had ceased to be swayed by his animal passions. All his life, when he could escape a moment from his greed[248] and his sensuality, he had been a philosopher. He had warmed both hands at the fire of his own egotism. He had flattered himself that he had known his own strength and his own weakness. He knew nothing of the sort. Just as in one direction he had overestimated his resolution, he was now to prove that he had underestimated it in another.

A day ago he would probably have writhed on the ground in a fit had he been confronted by a death by violence. By now, however, he had got beyond all that. There were things a man occasionally had to submit to, which made such a thing almost a luxury. He had spent that day upon the rack. The sharp rending asunder of his body and his soul would be a merciful release. His eyeballs would no longer start from their sockets; his limbs would no longer crack; nor would his blood burst through the walls of his arteries. His shuddering frame would be at peace.

The clock struck twelve. The landlord clenched his hands as he sat in his chair; a smile crept stealthily upon the dead white of his[249] cheeks. It was the last touch of irony that he, Gamaliel Hooker, should be sitting there so calmly looking a death by violence full in the face. To think that his old pampered flesh, cossetted and cushioned for sixty winters, should accept it without a murmur! The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb: Nature has her marvellous compensations; she takes the grossness from the animal spirit, that it may be insensible to the throes of death.

About one o’clock of the wintry morning the landlord rose from his chair, and had recourse to paper, a pen, and ink. He solemnly made his will. For the keeper of a sea tavern on a lonely coast, the home of the pirate and the smuggler, he had done excellently well in trade. He had added thrift to a natural aptitude. His money had not all been come by honestly, as the world interpreted that word. But that did not irk the landlord. All his life he had never pretended to a conscience. To him it was the hallmark of a superficial mind. And now in his last extremity he would not pretend to one. It was to be the great triumph[250] of his life, that in his last hour he should prove to be stronger than he had ever judged himself to be. He would yield up his life calmly, without a snuffle, a whine, or a prayer.

About two o’clock he had signed his name with controlled fingers to this document. He sanded it carefully and put it by. He had hardly done so, when he jumped up suddenly from his chair. An old stab returned upon him; he felt a twinge of the old agony. After all, there was a chance of life. Suppose the pursuing soldiers retook the King! They would be then in a mood to overlook all, and they might permit him to live! The landlord cursed himself for the thought. God! was he going to be tortured again before he was allowed to perish? No, it was only the last twinge of an expiring nerve. The pain passed almost in an instant. He need not be afraid.

Towards three, the old man grew very cold. He had forgotten to replenish the fire. It had gone out hours ago, leaving the ashes grey. He was getting tired; the soldiers were a long time coming; he would try to go to sleep. Soon[251] a pleasant lassitude stole upon his weariness. He had never been so exquisitely tired in his life before. It had been a heavy day; he had taken a lot out of himself; he deserved a rest. He fell asleep.

A little after four o’clock he awoke suddenly out of a dreamless slumber, as one startled. He lifted up his ears and listened. Horses! He rubbed his eyes in bewilderment. Why should he be sleeping there, and why should these signs invade the middle of the night? Ah yes, to be sure, he remembered! The soldiers were coming back.

His first thought was, had they caught the King? He banished it instantly. He had got past all that before he went to sleep. He would not go back, otherwise the last twenty-four hours had been lived in vain. He listened calmly for their near approach, but he still kept his chair by the side of the dead embers. There was no need for him to rise to let them in, as he remembered that he had not considered it necessary to secure the door before he went to sleep. What a transcendent[252] thing it was to have a heart utterly without bodily fear! It was rather hard, though, that he should only be allowed to experience that pleasure for so short a period in his long life. However, it was very excellent even to have known it at all. He could hardly be said to have lived in vain.

The landlord, still in his chair by the dead fire, watched the kitchen door. He saw it open. He saw Captain Culpeper appear, stiff and cold with riding, and very morose. His men, stiff and cold and morose too, crowded in behind him. The landlord neither moved nor spoke; he seemed wholly indifferent to their entrance.

“I knew it,” said the landlord, a little wearily. He closed his eyes; almost a smile came upon his white lips.

“Oh, you knew it!” said Captain Culpeper, with a grim satisfaction. “You knew it, did you! And how did you know it, fool and poltroon as you are?”

[253]“Poltroon I am,” said the landlord, “a thousand times a poltroon; but I am no fool. I knew it because I knew it.”

“Bah!” said the soldier, “I have not the patience to talk with you. But I trust the man and the woman are still upstairs in their chamber.”

“They are not,” said the landlord; there was a note of triumph in his voice. “A company of smugglers bore them away half an hour after your departure.”

“And you allowed them to leave your inn, after what I had said to you?” said Culpeper, striving to control the fury that was shaking him from head to foot.

“And you could not help the King’s going, I suppose,” said the soldier, “even when he went past your very nose?”

The soldier’s rage was giving place now to a[254] self-contained harshness which did not distress the landlord to observe.

“When the King went,” said the landlord, “I was not the master of myself; but, thank God, I am master of myself now.”

“You will soon cease to be,” said the soldier, regarding him with a grim surprise.

The soldiers crowded about the landlord with sinister intention upon their faces. Captain Culpeper briefly told two of them to procure a rope.

“Do you know for what purpose we require it, good Master Innkeeper?” said Culpeper, laughingly.

[255]The landlord astonished them vastly too. They had not looked for this demeanour in one who was about to undergo the penalty of death. They had never encountered such an indifference in the face of it before.

However, when the two men returned bearing a stout piece of hemp, an evidence was furnished of the price at which the landlord’s newly-acquired fortitude had been purchased. When his bloodshot eyes fell on the rope, a cord appeared to snap in the middle of his brain; his head revolved slowly on his neck; and he pitched heavily on to the kitchen floor.

They turned him over on his back, but all attempts to restore the landlord to sensibility failed. After a while he appeared to grow dimly conscious of his surroundings; but he was bereft of speech, and he had not the power to move. It mattered not what remedies they had recourse to, the horrible, convulsed white face still had the vacancy and the inanimation of death without the repose of it.

“’Tis a pity we could not hang the old rogue more prettily,” said Captain Culpeper,[256] when all their exertions had failed of their effect. “For if ever a man did merit a hanging, here he lies. He hath played a double game all through. But what he could have hoped to gain by it, for the life of me I cannot see. He must have been a sanguine fellow to think that he could run with the hare, and hunt with the dogs. He must have known that he went in danger of being torn to pieces. But why he should first betray the King, and then promote his escape, passes me completely. A queer old rogue, this landlord. Now then, lift him up, lads, and set him in the place he himself did choose.”

They placed the noose around the landlord’s neck and bore him out into the shrewd air of the morning. It was still as dark as pitch; never a star looked out of the sky; mercifully the moon had hidden her face; and thus the body of the landlord was unregarded, as it swung in the wintry darkness from the signboard of the “Sea Rover.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

CHAPTER	PAGE
I.	The Man Out of the Night	1
II.	The Quest of the King	12
III.	The Strange Visitors that Came to the “Sea Rover”	27
IV.	Will Jackson	41
V.	Shows the Inconveniences that May Sometimes Attend an Active Mind	65
VI.	The Night: The Sea: The Rocks	80
VII.	The Woman	94
VIII.	The King’s Face	110
IX.	The Man in Bed	128
X.	Le Roi s’Amuse	149
XI.	The Psychology of Cowardice	164
XII.	The Mariner	175
XIII.	The Soldiers	197
XIV.	The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King	212
XV.	“Way There for the King’s Servitor!”	227
XVI.	The Departing Guests	232
XVII.	The Landlord	245

PATRICIA at the INN

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I The Man out of the Night

CHAPTER II The quest of the King

CHAPTER III The strange Visitors that came to the Sea Rover

CHAPTER IV Will Jackson

CHAPTER V Shows the inconveniences that may sometimes attend an active mind

CHAPTER VI The night: the Sea: the Rocks:

CHAPTER VII The Woman

CHAPTER VIII The King’s face

CHAPTER IX The man in Bed

CHAPTER X Le Roi s’amuse

CHAPTER XI The Psychology of cowardice

CHAPTER XII The Mariner

CHAPTER XIII The Soldiers

CHAPTER XIV The Divinity that doth hedge a King

CHAPTER XV “Way there for the King’s servitor”

CHAPTER XVI The departing Guests

CHAPTER XVII The Landlord