Part 9

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.

“What is this you say, landlord?” said the King.

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 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.

“What is this you say, landlord?” asked the calm voice of the King.

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

“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 never-ceasing voice of the breakers, beating against the wind and rocks.

“I only hear the roar of the sea,” said the lady, a minute afterwards.

“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:

“What hour do you desire your supper, Sire?”

The King took out his watch and glanced at it.

“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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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.

“Our landlord was right,” said the 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 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.”

All listened with wildly-beating hearts.

“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.

“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.”

“Sire,” cried the woman, “you must not, you shall not be ta’en!”

“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.

“They shall not enter!” cried the woman, with an almost childish impotence.

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.

“Open!” said a stern, excited voice.

“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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

“Madam,” he said, “be calm, I pray you. We must bow to the inevitable.”

Very gently he unclasped the arms of his wife from about his neck. He then turned to 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 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 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 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.”

The servitor still stood calm and impassive.