The City clocks were chiming four in the starry chill of a December
morning as the King and his two attendants hurried down Whitehall
stairs to the river. A boat, bespoken hours earlier by his valet
Abbadie, who was in waiting for the party, lay ready off the public
steps. These, for an obvious reason, had been chosen in preference to
the privy stairs, and the result seemed to justify the precaution. The
fugitives were not observed or followed, it appeared--unless any
significance attached to the form of a sleeping loafer, sprawled
heavily over a baulk of timber hard by--and in any case they were all
prepared, if challenged, to assume the rôle of belated citizens
taking boat after a frolic.
The two oars, proved men, were, if not in the actual secret of the
escape, sufficiently near it to act in all things with quiet and
dispatch. The embarkation proceeded noiselessly, and Sir Edward Hales,
the last of the party, was about to step on board, when a remark,
_sotto voce_, from one fellow to the other arrested his attention. He
paused, his foot on the gunnel, and quickly demanded an explanation.
“Why, see, your honour,” said the man in a low voice, “you’re
over-late, and the tide’s at the slack. With a pull of thirty miles
before us and a heavy boat, it’s odds but we meet the flow this side
Greenwich.”
“What, then, waterman?”
“We shan’t fetch Gravesend before daylight, that’s all.”
Sir Edward, being a faithful Papist and Jacobite, cursed ecumenically.
Ex-Lieutenant of the Tower, he had only just been dispossessed of his
post, a significant one, by dictate of the usurper, and Fate, he felt,
might have spared him these lesser vexations. It was important above
all things at this pass to get the King bestowed under cover of
darkness in the vessel that awaited him at the river-mouth.
“Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply.
The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said--“two
oars and the sculls.”
Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr.
Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be
left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set
his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound
the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice
sounded behind him:
“Here’s at your service, master.”
Sir Edward started and turned round. It was the sleeper, it seemed,
who had risen and come behind him unobserved--an immense shambling
figure of a man, ragged and hoary. Power no less than age spoke in his
massive frame, in his hands like roots, in his sinewy neck. Even the
few teeth that remained to him were like bones of contention in a
resolute jaw. Shadowy, a dim giant, he stood up in his mouldy duds in
the starlight.
An opportune phantom, too foul and solitary for a spy. Sir Edward,
under stress of urgency, took what the Fates had sent him.
“Can you pull?” he asked only.
The great creature jeered hoarsely.
“Aye,” he said, “though it were the house of Dagon about the ears of
the Philistines.”
Sir Edward made a wry mouth; there was a tang in this of the pietistic
cant he was old enough to remember. But the occasion was urgent.
“We desire to light at Gravesend before dawn,” he said. “You shall be
well paid if you enable us.”
He entered the boat, and the man followed, the latter signifying in a
determined manner that he would pull stroke. The concession being made
to a certain arrogance of will in the fellow as much as to his
physical strength, they took their seats and the craft put off.
The four passengers were all in cloaks and unfeathered hats. The King,
unconscious, it seemed, of the addition to their number, or of the
brief parley which had led to it, sat next the water, dark, silent,
preoccupied. They had hardly reached midstream when he put his hand
over the side, and something slid from it into the flood without
splash or sound. As he recovered his position with a sigh, his eyes
encountered those of the new-comer, and he started slightly and spoke
under his breath:
“Who is this?”
“A figure of exigency, sir,” whispered Sheldon, “hired to speed us the
quicker to an end. A supplementary hand and a strong one was needed,
it seems, to bring us under night to our goal.”
His Majesty said no more, but his eyes, hollow and tragic, continued
to con the stranger. He seemed to him to have arisen, like a sudden
cloud, huge and menacing, against the dim horizon of his hopes. That
had not ceased to glimmer faintly, to his mind’s strained vision,
through all the gloom of this long bitter night. A haunting sense of
unreality pursued and half stupefied him. He felt like one in an
enchanted wood, always sighting deliverance and always mistaken, yet
drawn on by perpetual expectation. There had been something fantastic
and illusory in this rapid vanishing of a kingdom; it seemed even now
a myth, a jest. He would wake presently and laugh over the strangeness
of that very vivid dream. It had been the oddest experience to feel
State, authority, service, friendship, a throne, a people, all
suddenly slipping from him, as if the bottom, in one unexpected
moment, had come out of his universe; to feel himself, when in a
condition of normal security, all at once, as in a nightmare, standing
exposed and reviled, an alien not only in his own Court, but in his
own country. The thing seemed too preposterous for belief, like the
fantasy of a dead man witnessing in substance his own funeral, and he
existed and moved in the constant expectation of the strange cloud’s
dispelling. These shadows of the few faithful who remained to him
would explain themselves and their insignificance; the flight by icy
starlight would merge itself into the confused flow of a dream; the
very curdling of the water would become the ropy web of moisture over
sleeping eyeballs. Steadily he had kept his vision concentrated on
that line of dawn which was to end the long delusion, and when the new
shape rose to block it he felt suddenly as if his hope were overcast,
and he awake at length to full consciousness of the truth. From that
moment, for some unknown reason, he despaired.
The boat was sped on its course by muscular arms. The regular pump of
the oars, churning up liquid gold, the flight of house and palace,
vast hilly hulks of shadow that fled behind them into vaster glooms,
the silence and the stress seemed to hypnotise the party, so that none
spoke or moved. But the eyes of the King, fixed and haggard, never
left the face of the nearest oarsman. Even when, with a dive and rush,
they shot into the stream that thundered under London Bridge, his gaze
did not falter or withdraw itself for a moment. But presently, when
they hove into the weltering shadow of the Tower, as if in an
uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward, and, touching the stranger
on the knee, spoke: “You guess what destinies you carry, my friend?”
Sir Edward Hales started and put out an expostulatory hand; but the
great thing, never ceasing in his labours, only mowed and nodded.
“Aye,” he said, “I knew you from the first, James Stuart.”
The King sat back, stiff and motionless.
“No traitor?” he demanded rigidly.
The man gave a short laugh.
“No traitor to my own principles,” he said, “which are to free Judea
of the last of thy house and dynasty.”
Sir Edward ground out a killing oath; but the King silenced him. Here
was evidently a survival of the fierce fanaticism of the ’forties, and
still unappeased by the blood of an ancient holocaust. It seemed a
significant, an ominous chance to have encountered him at this pass. A
profounder dejection settled upon James’s heart. He spoke as if
appealing:
“You wish us gone, my friend?”
“Aye,” said the creature, “I wish you gone.”
“For what reason?”
“So that I may live again.”
“Live?”
“Other than as the scapegoat that bore upon his head the iniquities of
the unclean. For twenty-eight years have I sojourned in the desert,
nameless, hungry, and abhorred--I, that delivered Judah of her sins.
Yet the hour is mine at last. The elect shall receive and justify me.
Thy deposition is my restoration, James Stuart. Judge if I rejoice to
speed thee on thy way.”
“Mad,” snapped Sir Edward shortly.
The midmost sculler, without stopping pulling, put in his oar, so to
speak:
“Let the ranter mouth, master, so he keeps his fists shut on his task
and swings to ’t.”
“Not so mad, either,” retorted the giant. Continuing to pull with his
left hand, he flung out his right towards the dark blot of the Tower
shrinking behind them. “It fades, King,” he cried--“the symbol of thy
sovereignty, the shambles sanctified by the blood of Freedom’s
martyrs. Harrison, Coke, Peters, and the rest--remember them in the
day of thy tribulation, since the Lord hath made of their servant and
right hand the instrument of His retribution. They died to testify;
but the instrument remains to extirpate. It shall be acclaimed and
honoured henceforth in the temples of the Lord.”
The prospect seemed somehow to goad him to more furious exertions; the
boat groaned under his strokes. A madman, no doubt, and best humoured
and disregarded. He did not speak again, and in silence the journey
was continued. Only an oppression as of death sat upon the heart of
the King, and his eyes for ever sought behind the great rocking figure
some sign of the dawn that his soul so desired and his interests so
feared.
But they drove, unpursued and unmolested, down the starry flood; and
presently the waters broadened and there blew a little sea-breeze
among the scattered shipping. And suddenly Sir Edward Hales, intently
alert, gave a sharp low order, and they ran under the counter of a
small unobtrusive vessel lying at anchor in the midstream. There were
white faces here looking over the bulwarks, and, down in the chains,
hands ready to support the fugitives aboard. Then his Majesty, having
mounted, and before he turned to withdraw, bade Sir Edward reward his
boatmen with a liberal vail, which duty the knight performed. But,
even as he received his tribute, and the boat drifted away, the hoary
giant rose in his place and cast the money into the water.
“I am paid a thousandfold,” he roared, “in the extirpation of thy
race.”
The King, with a ghastly face, leaned forward.
“In God’s name, who are you?” he cried.
The answer came back, mad and jubilant, across the widening interval:
“Ask me who I was, and I reply, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, who cut off
the King your father’s head upon the scaffold.”