Chapter III: Part 3

“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 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.

“Have mercy, I beseech you!” was her cry.

The landlord laughed in her face.

“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!”

“Mother of God!” said the landlord. “I will do my duty.”

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:

“Madam, I am determined to do my duty.”

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

The landlord turned from her coldly.

“Will you have no pity for the agonies of a 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.

“Mercy, mercy!” she moaned as her eyes came open.

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 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.”

The woman’s heart leapt in her side.

“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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

“My lad,” said Gamaliel, sternly, “what did you during the night?”

“Slept,” said the fellow, laconically.

“Did you not walk abroad?” said the landlord.

“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, 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.

“Do you give the lie to my ears and eyes?” he cried.

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.

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. 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.

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

He then turned, bully as he was, even more roughly on the woman.

“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, 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 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.

“Madam, I demand an answer,” said the landlord.

“I have never seen this--this--this man ere now,” the woman faltered.

“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.”

The woman grew white to the lips.

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

“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!”

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.

“Rise, madam,” said Will Jackson.

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 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 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.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.

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.”

“Think of your husband’s life, madam,” said the triumphant landlord.

Neither the man nor the woman paid heed to 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.”

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 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 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?”

The King put his hand upon her shoulder, gently.

“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 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; 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

“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 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.”

The King shrugged his shoulders.

“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 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.”

“I have no choice other than to grant it then,” said the King.

“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.

“Madam,” said the man in the bed, imperiously, “do you not hear me?”

“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.

“Sire,” she said, “may I crave a boon of you also?”

“We pray you to do so,” said Charles.

“Let me beseech you to leave this chamber, Sire, now--instantly.”

“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 crave a similar boon of you. We would have you quit this chamber, too.”

“I cannot quit it, Sire,” she said, firmly.

“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, 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. “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.”

“Nay, Sire, he shall not,” said the woman, defiantly.

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.

“Madam, I must ask you to give them to us,” said the King.

“Never!” said the woman.

The King shrugged his shoulders and put his brows up whimsically.

“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.”

The King held out his hand to take them with a pretty air.

“Never!” said the lady. Her fingers grasped them tighter than before.

“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.

“Madam, the King commands you,” he said.

“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. Give them up to the King at once, d’ye hear, or ’fore God! I will make you.”

“Never, Harry!” said his wife.

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.

“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.”

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.”

“This, Sire,” said Lord Farnham.

By now he had got that petulant voice of his under admirable control.

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

Lord Farnham thanked him humbly.

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 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. 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.

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

The woman ran forward and flung herself into his arms.

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, now, did you ever seriously for a moment think you could?”

“I did, Sire, and tried,” said Lord Farnham.

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

“True, Sire,” said Farnham.

“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 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:

“My God, I fear I was stark mad!”

“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 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 woman said, “is the noblest and the most ill-fated name that ever a king did bear.”

“Curse him!” said the husband. “I learnt to hate him before to-day.”

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 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?”

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