CHAPTER II

MINERVA’S NOSE

Charles stood listening to Wynkin’s departing footsteps down the oaken staircase till the last echo of them died out. Even then perhaps he would not have stirred, had it not been for the merle, who suddenly piped a plaintive note or two in his cage, which Wynkin had hung upon a handy nail near the window.

“Ah,” cried Charles, turning quickly to the bird, “I forgot all about you.”

The merle looked at him with his bright eyes, in which there seemed to the boy to be a sorrowful pleading expression.

“What is the matter, birdie, old fellow?” said Charles. “Are you hungry? No; they would never have neglected to give you seed and water, I am sure.”

And there, as he looked to ascertain, he found not only seed and water to the very brim of the pannikins, but also, stuck between the bars, a big piece of watercress, while at the bottom of the cage was a large worm wriggling about. Nothing, in fact, was wanting to the convenience and content of the tenant of the cage—in the way, that is, of creature comforts—but his wings drooped forlornly, and he looked very unhappy, nevertheless.

“Ah,” said the Prince, as he clambered on to the high window-seat, and took down the cage, “I like you very much, you dear little fellow; and I should like to keep you, for I am very lonely, and you are most sweet company, and it is a very fine cage, isn’t it? But you are breaking your merry heart in it, I am positive you are, and you shall get out. Her ladyship may not approve; she may even whip me for it, though I believe she mustn’t do that, much as her fingers often itch for it, but I’m going to let you go,” and so saying, he unfastened the door of the cage, and set the entrance against the open lattice. “There, go,” he went on, as for an instant the bird perked his shiny head on one side, as if he was listening intently to all Charles was saying to him, “fly away, dear bird, and joy go with you, for outside you will find it again.”

And then with a flap of his wings, away flew the merle, straight across the moat into mid-air, till he reached the bough of a high elm not far off. There he settled, and opening his yellow beak, he set up such a joyous song as never was heard—anyway, inside a cage.

“I expect,” said Charles, looking into the cage again, and poking the watercress stalk under the body of the worm, “that you would rather wriggle down there among the flowers than in that miserable sprinkling of sand,” and with that he flung the worm far across the moat on to the grassy bank below. “Of course, if Master Merle catches you again, you must settle the matter between you, and it is certain he will be picking up an appetite again now, and it will be ‘catch as catch can.’”

Then, putting the toe of his little silver-and-blue rosetted shoes to the cage, he sent it flying to the other side of the room. That done, he dropped wearily down again in the great tall velvet chair, and lolled back, a very picture of misery and discontent.

“Who’d imagine,” he muttered to himself, “that it was such a horrid thing to be a Prince? I wonder if all Princes are so wretched, or whether it is only Princes of Wales, like me?” Then he yawned and lay with his eyes wandering listlessly round the room, watching the rays of the afternoon sun as they poured in at the lattice. The air felt stifling, for it was a small room, considering, that is, that the house was such a large one; but great mansions in those golden days, when Charles the First was King, contained rooms of all sizes as well as all shapes. Rooms were not merely four square walls, as mostly they are now, but built as it might be into all sorts of passages and corridors and staircase landings, now with a step or two up, now with a step or two down. One reason for this was that, as time went on, the owners of these big houses would add on a piece here, a wing there, and the level of the old floors and the new floors would not always exactly lie together, but it made the houses much more amusing and snug to live in.

Such a queer hole-and-corner chamber was the old Cedar Room, as it was called, in which little Charles Stuart, King Charles the First’s eldest son, had been shut up for three weeks past. The King himself, with his Court, had been in London, but the Roundheads, who were the King’s discontented subjects, and the Royalists, who were faithful to him, were glowing into a red heat of rage with each other. It was no longer safe for the little boy to be in London, and so the King had entrusted him to the care of one of his most devoted friends and counselors, who took him away at dead of night from London to his home in Warwickshire, and nobody—not even the other Royalists—was certain where the child was. Many thought that he had been carried across the sea to France. It was not of much use telling the boy that he had been taken away from his father and mother for his good. The poor little lad was not old enough to understand how this could be, and so he was very unhappy, and he detested with all his might that old Cedar Room, and all that was in it, though it was considered a vastly fine room, and a very curious one. That, indeed, was one reason why Lady Chauncy, who, for all her prim manner, was a most kind, motherly person, had persuaded her husband to lodge the young Prince in it, “for besides being so high up and remote,” said she, “the mannikins will be huge and endless amusement for him, and make the time pass more quickly till there is an end to all this pother, and the child can get about again.”

Now, the mannikins, as her ladyship called them, were the little figures carved on the panels of the walls all around the Cedar Room, which was of a rather lop-sided shape, neither square nor oblong, but a little of all three fitted into the uppermost part of an angle of the mansion which jutted far over the moat. These panels were very old, at least two hundred years, and the room was as ancient, but its walls were as stout and sturdy as on the day they were made. The panels were of Flemish carving, and they represented the gods and goddesses of heathen mythology. There was Jupiter hurling lightning from his throne, Juno with her peacocks, Vulcan hammering away on his anvil, and Minerva sitting up very majestically in her helmet and coat of mail, holding her shield. The faces, however, of these far-famed personages were far from being like what Charles had always imagined of them when his father had related tales about them to him, as often he had done. According to this description of them, which sometimes the King would read out loud to him from the poetry-history of Homer, they were beautiful, even glorious, to look upon, but these mannikins were as ugly and clumsy almost as if they were made of gilt gingerbread. They were pretty well as broad as they were long, dressed in jerkins, or muffled in cloaks and full skirts, and their faces were almost all nose, that is to say, where they had any at all, for many of the noses had stuck out so far that they had got chipped off or worn flat. Why the carver of all these gentry had made such a point of their noses puzzled Charles, who for the first few days of his living in the Cedar Room was certainly immensely amused with this silent, droll company; but after a while he got cross with their dull faces.

“If they were real,” he said one day to Wynkin, “what blockheads they would be!”

“And blockheads they are now,” had been Wynkin’s reply.

And if there was one of the wooden folk Charles found more irritating than another, it was Madam Minerva. She sat up so prim and cross-looking and her nose poking out from under her helmet, bigger even than that of great Jove himself; or so it seemed to Charles, as he lay listlessly watching the afternoon sun-rays pouring in at the lattice, and listening half glad, half sad to the piping of the happy merle in the elm-tree, and the voices of the harvesters far down below in the fields.

How he longed to be with them and watch the loading of those last sheaves into the big carts, and how stiflingly hot the Cedar Room was, and how particularly forbidding and disagreeable goddess Minerva there looked, and how uncomfortable and heavy must be that scale armor of hers, and that shield, and the helmet, not to speak of such a nose. Ah! And, stretching out his hand over the arm of the chair, Charles picked up his toy bow, which lay with his own gilt pasteboard cuirass and tin helmet and wooden broadsword and other weapons on the floor, and setting the bow with a bolt, he sat waiting. “Yes,” he murmured, with a wag of his head, and setting his lips tight, “I won’t put up with her any longer, her and her nose. And when that sun-ray tips it with red, as in a minute or two it will, I—I’ll see if I can’t hit it. I’ve hit a better mark before now.” Then he waited and watched, and the crimson gleams crept on and on across the carved panels, and—whizz! went the string, snapping right back across Charles’s own nose so sharply that it stung him and he shut his eyes for a minute. When he opened them he beheld a strange and most unexpected sight.