“THE CAVALIER’S PETS.”
DIFFERENT generations are marked by their different favourites,
especially among those who have the means and the leisure for the
cultivation of such predilections, in newly introduced animals and
plants. Even human beings are included in this category, and so we
had an era of dwarfs and an era of black boys, as half-attendants,
half-playthings for fine ladies and gentlemen. Among the lower animals
there was a monkey period and a macaw period, both of which have
passed away in a great measure. Among plants we have had the seasons
when dahlias and pansies first came into vogue and became objects of
absorbing interest, and the year which saw the importation of the
glorious Tom Thumb geranium.
Dogs are no exception to this influence of fashion, so that there is a
double sense in which “every dog has its day.” Even living persons have
seen many canine candidates for such honours. The spotted Danish hound
had his day, so had the bouncing, curly, jet black Newfoundland, the
grand liver-coloured mastiff, the fierce white bull-dog, the hideous
crooked-legged turnspit, the hardly less ugly, long-bodied, pig-headed
boar-hound, the Pomeranian, with its sleek hair and fox’s head, and the
little cocker, with its indescribably comical, crushed-up nose.
The origin of some of these manias must have been whimsical enough; but
our concern is with the fact that in the reign of the first Charles
there became prominent as pets in England a race of small dogs known
as the King Charles spaniel, and that at a later period the Blenheim
spaniel came into notice. Both races were and are aristocrats of the
first water, connected in the very names of the species with royal and
ducal houses.
I speak as an ignorant woman; but my impression is, that the King
Charles is of French nationality, and that the little brute not only
came to England in the train of pretty, foolish, flighty Henrietta
Maria, but that it made its appearance in Scotland two generations
earlier, in the suite of the beautiful and miserable Mary Stewart.
Unless tradition lie, such a dog crept beside the block at Fotheringhay—
“The little dog that licked her hand, the last of all the crowd
Which sunned themselves beneath her glance, and round her footsteps
bowed.”
King Charles spaniels were at a premium in England in the reigns of
the two sovereigns of that name. I don’t doubt that they were under a
cloud during the Protectorate, and that stout Oliver Cromwell owned
none of them; but we find one in the study of Sir Isaac Newton, in its
ignorant unconsciousness working dire mischief among the philosopher’s
priceless calculations, and drawing down on its empty head the mildest
rebuke—“Diamond, Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief thou hast
done.” However, I think the spaniels fell somewhat into disgrace, in
consequence of the bad company they kept in the second Charles’ reign;
and because that most unheroic of merry monarchs played with his little
dogs, and fed his ducks, when he ought to have been fighting the Dutch
on the Thames, or relieving the sufferers in plague-stricken London.
No doubt, in the archives of the house of Marlborough there is an
account of the rise of the Blenheim dogs; but though I bow to the
authority of Landseer, I am driven to conclude them a more modern
“fancy,” even as the renown of Blenheim has its origin in John
Churchill, and his victories in Queen Anne’s reign. Yet here are a King
Charles and a Blenheim lying side by side, one of them on the very
brim of a cavalier’s steeple-crowned hat, with its ostrich feather.
The black and tan of the King Charles, relieved by a little white here
and there, contrasts admirably with the mass of milky white, picked
out with liver-colour, in the Blenheim. The silkiness of their long
flapping ears is only matched by the glossy texture of their coats
and the featheriness of their tails. Their soft paws are made for
begging, or for resting their faces between them, as in the case of the
Blenheim in the illustration. Their eyes are big, with an odd jumble
of wilfulness and beseeching, like the eyes of some spoiled children.
They are the loveliest and the idlest little pets in the world. They
are adepts at coaxing and caressing, which form, indeed, a large part
of their stock-in-trade—not that they are necessarily insincere, but
they are very useless, very dependent, and they can but fondle like
a child, as a small return for all the care and kindness lavished
upon them. They are made to be decked in ribbons, not as part of a
grand festive display—when even a huge gaunt Flora may submit to the
unsuitable accompaniment, simply to do honour to the occasion—but
because frippery of knots and bows belongs to them as to babies and
beauties and dandies. The little dogs like their ribbons as they like
their combings, washings, and gay baskets, all of which bigger dogs
would look upon as an unmitigated nuisance.
Withal, the King Charleses and the Blenheims have one serious personal
disadvantage. Their voices are not like Cordelia’s, low and sweet,
neither are they, of course, sonorous, like the voice of a big dog.
They have a high-pitched, thin, wearisome yelp, which, when they are
vexed or angry, becomes painfully querulous, or peevishly vixenish.
All the other dogs we have discussed could do something for their
living, besides looking pretty, wriggling and chasing their tails. Even
Carlo could course when he was requested; but Roi—or Roy, as his name
was corrupted into old English—and Reine were destitute of resources
beyond the simple ones mentioned. Were those gifts enough to entitle
the dogs to the daintiest maintenance? Were the shallow creatures
worthy of being a man’s companions and friends? Alas! if our receipts
were measured by our deserts, many of us would fare but badly. The
little dogs were endowed with one quality which we may be thankful
appeals more forcibly than any other to the hearts of men—not of weak
men alone or principally, but of the manliest and most generous of
their kind. Roy and Reine were helpless as delicate women and feeble
children, and in that very helplessness lay their charm to the strong
and capable, who were not bullies in their strength, or arrogant in
their power.
I do not say that there is not a subtle flattery and deep danger
in this appeal of weakness to strength. I do not pretend that it
has not ruined, unawares, many a Samson, destroying him by his very
magnanimity. But I do hold that the tenderness for beings at men’s
mercy belongs to one of the noblest, gentlest instincts of the human
heart, and that it is not only chivalrous in its development, it is,
when rightly judged, profoundly Christian in its sympathies.
Roy and Reine lived considerably more than two hundred years ago, when
there was another England from the one we live in to-day, an England of
keen political strife. (Well, perhaps that is peculiar to no time, or
at least occurs periodically once in every generation.) But it was also
an England of such civil war and bloodshed, polluting its fresh fields,
and darkening its peaceful hearths, as happily has not been seen since
then—not when Monmouth was routed at Sedgemoor—not when the last James
fled in his turn, and William of Orange landed, and appropriated
the crown left vacant, which became twin circlets for his head and
Mary’s—not when Bonnie Prince Charlie—a fatal title, which could not
give way to anything more trustworthy—marched with his Highlanders as
far south as Derby.
Charles the First and his Star Chamber, with his French queen and
her French manœuvres, had turned the people of England against
their government. The last Parliaments had proved either divided or
rebellious. John Hampden had refused to pay the illegal ship-money; the
train bands had been mustered; the whole country had risen to arms.
England was parted into two warlike camps, Royalist and Roundhead.
We can see now that there were good and devoted men on both sides,
and of every shade of opinion. We can think dispassionately of Lord
Falkland the Royalist, and Colonel Hutchinson the Roundhead—of Milton
and Andrew Marvel on the one hand, and Jeremy Taylor on the other. But
it was fearfully difficult then—in the midst of bitter accusations,
hard blows, and cruel wrongs, inflicted almost inevitably by both the
contending parties—to distinguish that there was any merit, or any
quality save base subserviency or turbulent anarchy, on that side which
differed from the faction of the person speaking.
It would be no easy task to decide which of the camps indulged most
largely in abusing and slandering the other; but it belonged to the
nature of things, and to the characteristics of the men and their
leaders, that the Cavaliers, taking them all in all, were the most
careless and reckless in the expression of their feelings. It was part
of the profession of every Cavalier, from Prince Rupert downwards, to
be easy-minded and light-hearted, as he was loyal, to the backbone. He
made it a matter of honour that his joviality should be a proof that
his conscience was clear, and his cause that of the divine right of
kings and the unquestioning obedience of subjects. The very nickname,
“crop-eared knave,” which one man applied to his adversary, as opposed
to the term “malignant,” given by the Puritan to the Cavalier, showed
the light scorn of complacent superiority pitted against deadly
earnestness and desperate condemnation.
As it happened in the long run, to their mutual profit, the stout
defiant Cavaliers were forced to respect the equally stout and dogged
Roundheads, and to carry rueful hearts within their bold breasts under
their bluff exteriors; and the Roundheads were compelled to grant grace
to men who—in spite of their effeminate love-looks, the levity of their
songs, even the profanity of their oaths—struggled against defeat like
Englishmen, endured like men, and, with all their follies and sins,
were the countrymen and neighbours of their conquerors. As they were
human and Christian, these conquerors could not see the beaten foemen
biting the dust and wallowing in their blood silently, and think of
the near and far halls and granges which these deaths, that were their
deed, would leave desolate, without groaning in spirit over some of the
fruits of victory, even while the fighters were persuaded it was the
Lord’s triumph over the Man of Sin and Satan.
Roy and Reine’s master was a Cavalier, a man in the prime of life, who
had seen the loss of a good many things he valued, before the civil war
deprived him at last of his already dilapidated old court, and sent him
adrift to wander in disguise here and there, and lie in hiding till
better days came round, and the King should enjoy his own again. He
was a Master Neville of the Alders, himself a scion, and his estate a
fragment, of what had been, so far back as the Wars of the Roses, the
mighty Neville family, with their vast domains.
When peace yet prevailed in England, and the storm was only brewing in
the sky, Master Neville went to court and ruffled it with the best.
He was then a young man, and made a picturesque figure in his slashed
velvet satin doublet, his long Spanish leather boots, his falling
collar, and just such a hat and feather as is to be seen in the
picture, shading one of those swarthy oval faces which the peaked beard
of the time became, while his dark hair was suffered to grow, and was
tied by a ribbon—such as Roy and Reine are represented wearing—till
it hung in one long scented curl down his back. He was by no means
so destitute of resources as Roy and Reine were, apart from their
beauty and their winning ways. He was a bold, dashing, clever enough
young fellow, rather accomplished for his day. He could not compose a
madrigal like Lovelace, but he could sing it after it was composed. He
could fence, dance, fight, even speak when graceful fluent oratory was
all that was called for. He could bandy a jest with a court wit, and
manage a pageant with a master of the ceremonies.
In those days Master Neville married a court beauty in white satin
and pearls, with her yellow hair crisped in curls all round her pink
and white face, and brought her down to the Alders. The two did not
tarry long there with all their charms and accomplishments; the
simplicity and quiet of the country were too much for them, and they
were attracted back without fail to London, with its splendid court and
ceaseless stir, its water-parties and masks, cabals and intrigues, in
which the husband and wife played their parts in such company as that
of arrogant, magnificent Buckingham, and fair, frivolous Lucy Percy,
Countess of Carlisle.
But such company was neither safe nor economical for a mere aspiring
squire and his sympathetic madam. Many a fine oak and beech at the
Alders, and even some of its massive silver plate, paid for the master
and mistress’s addiction to town living with its extravagance.
At last there was an enforced retreat to the court, after it had been
stripped and impoverished of its most prized treasures, when the
nakedness of the land was a constant eye-sore and reproach to its
reluctantly returned owners. They had never cultivated the graces of
patience and contentment, and they had no gift which could lighten the
dreary monotony of what threatened to be a long banishment from their
paradise. They might have drifted fast into the evil refuge of bandying
reproaches and recriminations, and quarrelling away the dragging hours,
as Roy and Reine did not quarrel over their bits of sugar biscuit—only
madam was about as pretty, silly, and easily affectionate as the little
dogs, with no more exasperating practices of fretting and scolding
than they gave way to at times; so that Master Neville, who remained
perfectly conscious that he was a being more fully armed and highly
endowed, could not find it in his heart to blame her severely, or to
wreak on her a revenge for his own misdoings.
Doubtless he had been a little disappointed in her. In the days of
his young love, when he had extolled her yellow hair and pink and
white cheeks, he could hardly have contemplated mating himself to an
intellectual baby, who was never to grow any older—rather she was to
him then an embryo goddess, who was shortly to find her wisdom and
power. But he had enough justice to admit that the disappointment
was not her fault, and he took compensation in a certain amusement
which he found in his wife’s simplicity, as in that of Roy and Reine,
combined as it was with a due regard for him, and as much admiration
and reverence for his superior faculties as really narrow natures are
capable of; for be it remembered that essentially narrow natures, which
are circumscribed both morally and intellectually, can only compass a
languid and limited amount of admiration and reverence.
Master Neville was fairly kind and indulgent to his wife, though
men would have said that she had not been of the least service to
him—unless it be service to foster conceit, abet prodigality, and raise
an idle laugh. But men take a good deal upon them when they place
restrictions on the services of any creature that God has made, though
man may have done his best to mar it, while out of evil God brings
forth good. It might be that the protecting impulse which Madam Neville
drew forth in her husband preserved in him the seed of better things,
and kept him from being a harder and worse man than he became.
Then a strain of human sadness—all the more ineffable that it sounded
strangely foreign to the poor genteel comedy—entered into it. Madam
Neville’s children, that she had borne and spoiled in sheer weakness,
died one after another. Their mother, who would have been quickly
consoled—like a child to whom another toy is substituted for that which
has been removed—only that she was soon spent by a little watching and
weeping, fell into a rapid consumption before she could throw off her
grief, and followed her children.
The world looked on as at the crushing of a butterfly, or the
introducing of a tragic pathos into the soulless life of a fairy. But
there was a soul in this stunted human fairy, while a butterfly was
the ancients’ emblem of immortality; so good Master Arundel comforted
himself, as he strove with all his might to introduce a supernatural
element which should give a new aspect to the apparently pitiless
destruction, and cause it to be, after all, a miracle of divine mercy.
No question but Master Neville felt the double bereavement—the very
shock of it strewed silver threads in his black hair. But he was one of
those men who, with an outward frankness of address, keep their inner
lives as sealed books from their neighbours—almost, it would seem,
from the men themselves. He made no sign as he sat alone in his empty
hall, drank his flagon of wine or tankard of ale, and professed to busy
himself with his steward’s accounts, the flies for his fishing, or the
play-books he was fond of studying. He rode, and hunted, and visited
his neighbours much as usual. There might be a shade of greater reserve
and sternness in his manner, and he was in no haste to replace the
madam who was gone by a new madam to preside over the old court; but he
was still a man who trolled his song, took his wild jest, and rather
made a parade of his half-boisterous, half-sardonic philosophy.
But he always spared kindly notice for Roy and Reine—made them be seen
to, had them about him, playing with them, pulling their long ears,
teaching them tricks, praising and rewarding them with tit-bits—only
not plaguing them so much as of old—not more than the creatures liked
now. He certainly preferred the small encumbrances to any fox-hound or
lurcher in his kennel, which had brought him credit, or secured him a
prey. He would sooner suffer inconvenience himself than have Roy and
Reine disturbed; he would shrug his broad shoulders and take another
seat, to the great disgust of his old housekeeper, when he found
the two nestling together, fast asleep, in the depths of his great
arm-chair.
The vicar’s eyes used to moisten when he came upon the tall strong man
and his pets. “I suppose their utter unconsciousness, together with
their fondness, doth soothe the soreness and the void in his heart,”
said Master Arundel to himself; “and their entire dependence on him
makes an appeal to the tenderness that is at the bottom of Master
Neville’s imperious, boastful nature.”
The time came when Master Neville, with every man of any mind or energy
in the country, was roused by the state of public affairs—when he had
no longer leisure to manufacture his flies and ponder over his stage
saws—when he was rarely at home, or else had a host of company with
him. Riders and runners—posts, with carefully sealed and disposed of
letters, were constantly drawing bridle, or pausing footsore under
the gateway of the court. There was an eager rummaging out of rusty
matchlocks and swords, and an arming and marshalling of the servants,
and such tenants as Master Neville’s example and authority constrained.
At last a compact band of some twenty or thirty retainers, with
the squire—looking a proper man in his glittering steel morion and
breastplate—dashed with a flourish out of the courtyard.
But first Master Neville stood ready to start in the hall, and looked
for an instant all around him, from the musicians’ gallery to the deep
recesses of the window that were draped with clematis and jessamine.
There was nobody to take leave of save Roy and Reine, till Dame
Hynd, covertly wiping her eyes, stole to the door, under pretence of
receiving her master’s last orders, for he was not a man who could
brook spying on his privacy, or an unsolicited intrusion into states of
feeling which he did not confess even to himself, whether the offender
were intimate friend or old servant. She discovered Master Neville, in
what looked like a reverie, drawing Roy’s ears through the fingers of
one hand, and holding up a finger of the other to enjoin on Reine the
refraining from that jealousy to which she was prone.
“I am afraid the little brutes will have forgot my pretty lessons, and
will be as stupid and fat as yourself, dame, before I return,” he said,
with a mixture of mockery and rudeness, testy at the interruption;
and then he turned and begged her to forgive him, with an odd candid
sweetness that went far to breaking her heart. “Very likely that day
will never come, and so you will not mind this piece of impudence any
more than the rest of my offences. You will keep the house, though it
be for my worshipful cousin and heir, and see that, so far as you can
help it, neither old horse nor dog” (he was somewhat ashamed of his
partiality for the foolish spaniels, and thus did not particularise
them further), “which I am leaving behind me, come to grief. And you
will wish me good-bye and good luck; hey, dame?”
It was a breezy summer morning when Master Neville rode away at the
head of his band. It was a foggy winter day, with years between, when
he came back, attended by no more than two followers, and, shrouded
in the early darkness of a December afternoon, sought to get into the
old court, to spend a single night there. His arrival was unexpected;
but though it had been otherwise, neither Dame Hynd, who remembered
not only his marriage but his baptism, nor any other attached family
friend, dared have made the least demonstration of joy and welcome.
Fortune, or the will of Providence, had been against Master Neville and
his cause. The King’s troops had been beaten again and again, alike in
fenced cities and in the open field, before three weary men, soiled
with travel and rough living, approached by back ways and side gates,
skulking in the gloom into the house of which one of them was the
master.
“Alack and well-a-day!” cried Dame Hynd, wringing her hands at the
sorry plight of a gallant gentleman.
“It is the fortune of war, dame,” he cried, relishing condolence as
little as ever. He liked better the greeting of Roy and Reine, that
no Parliament or Lord Protector or Fairfax’s men in the neighbourhood
could prevent—timid creatures though the welcomers were—from rushing
to hail his arrival, with acclamation, little ringing yelps, much
scuttling to and fro and clambering up his legs, with lavish licking of
his muddy boots.
Having heard that the vicar was from home—indeed the worthy man
was in hiding with greater sinners—Master Neville proceeded to the
business which had brought him there—the destruction of private papers,
in anticipation of a visit to his house from a detachment of the
Parliamentary army.
“I don’t think you have anything to fear at the rogues’ hands,” he told
his housekeeper, as he prepared to leave again in the dank dawn of
the next morning. “You have my leave to speak them fair. As for me, I
think I shall make the country quit of me—like others I will not name;
God be praised, they are out of danger;” and he raised his beaver for
an instant—“till better times. I see my way to the coast, and I shall
do my best to survive a term of existence in some wretched mouldy or
whitewashed French or Dutch town. Why, I should not care to carry off
my beauties with me to bear me company,” he cried on a sudden impulse,
catching up Roy and Reine, the one after the other, and depositing
them in the deep pockets of his coat. He had often stowed them there
when they were wearied with trotting at his heels in his walks in the
park or the meadows—or when he passed through his herds of cattle,
of which the little spaniels were inordinately afraid, so that if he
forgot them they would grovel unperceived in some furrow, and lie
there panting and half-dead with terror, though the oxen were not even
looking at them, till he missed them and returned to search for, rally,
and fetch them home.
“I wot you’ll take something there’s more sense in, master,”
remonstrated Dame Hynd, loath to oppose him at such a moment, yet
driven almost past her patience by the freak.
“There is sense enough in the proposal,” he insisted. “They are my
esteemed play-fellows, and they may serve me for a breakfast some
fine morning, when hunger craves and all other provisions fail,” he
added, in allusion to the Cavaliers’ favourite jest of one of Rupert’s
troopers, when they were riding through a town in the Puritan interest,
snatching up a fat baby, and poising it screaming before him on the
crupper of his saddle, as he announced, amidst a grinning roar of
assent from his comrades—while the horrified populace mobbed them,
raging powerlessly—that here would be a nice roast wherewith to break a
long fast.
Master Neville, with the little dogs in his pockets, turned away
laughing from the old home which he might never see again.
The Cavalier squire proved wrong in his calculation as to gaining the
coast forthwith; instead, he had to go through a lengthened experience
of that most humiliating ordeal to a man—fleeing before the enemies
he has despised. He had to move here and there in various irksome
disguises—to seek help from friends ill able to afford it—to elude the
vigilance of wide-awake, sometimes vindictive foes—to endure no scant
measure of pains and penalties. But, through all, he never abandoned
the poor pets with which he had rashly cumbered himself.
Occasionally, when he was so well up in the world as to represent a
pedlar, with his pack on his back, vending his wares from one country
house to another, or from town to town, he would display the little
animals openly, and freely admit they had belonged to a gentleman in
trouble. Then if some grave father or mother, brother or friend, so far
relaxed in their lofty scorn of all toys as to propose to chaffer for
the dogs in behalf of a doted-on grandson or a tender-hearted maiden,
the reputed pedlar would excuse himself in a flow of specious words,
explaining, with a double meaning in the assertion, that he was only
conveying the dogs for their rightful owner, and had no warrant to
dispose of them.
At other times, when Master Neville was playing the beggar, asking alms
from door to door, he had cunningly to conceal Roy and Reine, lest he
should become liable to the suspicion of having stolen them.
The dogs and their master shared and fared alike, and though they had
good days and bad days, it soon befell that Roy and Reine, who had
been reared on dainties, and who had at first turned up their noses in
disgust, like petted children, at plain food, and rather gone without a
meal than deigned to touch it, were fain, like Master Neville, to eat
heartily and thankfully of homely scraps. Though all three were often
hungry enough before they came to this pass, I need not say that the
day never dawned when the Cavalier was reduced to kindling a fire in
the shelter of the hedge, gipsy fashion, and cooking Roy and Reine for
breakfast, dinner, or supper.
But another day arrived when the prescribed fugitive had wandered many
a mile, and sat down faint and weary by a brooklet that crossed his
path. He had turned aside for the purpose into a little wood through
which the stream gurgled. It was a golden harvest day, with the green
of the fern changing to straw-colour, and the leaves of the wild
cherry-trees becoming brushed with crimson. He could hear the hearty
voices of the reapers from a cornfield beyond the wood in which he
had taken shelter; but there was no harvest or ingathering for Master
Neville. He scrupled even to draw near to his fellow-creatures and ask
grace from them in their rejoicing, since he was in a specially hostile
district.
However, it was not his way to complain. He sat and courted repose
after his fatigue, while he listened to the trill of the robin which
was taking up the fuller song of earlier song-birds. He had a hunch of
bread in his wallet, and he prepared to divide it with Roy and Reine.
The little dogs had lost much of their sleekness and trimness. No
ribbons adorned their necks; their master had cut off the last faded
rag long ago. As he watched them listlessly, he was sorry to see the
tokens of adversity in their roughening coats, in the griminess of
Reine, which gave her white livery a strong resemblance to the greasy
shabbiness of a disreputable white kitten that has run the gauntlet of
all the pots and pans in a kitchen. Then he glanced at his own ragged
sleeve and at the weather-stained skin beneath, and reflected that the
appearance of the dogs was in keeping with that of their master.
Reine certainly did not take ill with reverses; though she was getting
up in years, she was more frisky than he recollected to have known
her. As he was about to give her the crust which was her due, she
voluntarily stood up on her hind legs, and, quite ignoring the fact
that dancing was prohibited by the Puritans, began to execute a _pas
seul_ which he had taught her when he was an idle gentleman and she
a pampered favourite in the hall of the Alders. The spectacle of the
dirty, dishevelled little dog, in the untoward circumstances, capering
demurely, of her own accord, like Queen Elizabeth before the Scotch
Ambassador, overcame a man in whom a sense of the ridiculous was
naturally strong, and he laughed till the tears ran down his battered
cheeks.
Afterwards his attention was drawn to Roy, that was not joining in
the dance, and had only sniffed at the bit of bread he had already
received. The action had not been disdainful, as of old, but wistful,
and with a certain heaviness before the dog turned away from his meal,
and crept back, with hanging head and drooping tail, to crouch down
near his master. Master Neville remembered that Roy had fallen behind
in the morning’s walk. He spoke encouragingly to the dog, and invited
him to his knee, which had always been a coveted couch and throne of
honour with the little pair.
But all Roy’s response was to look up with the eyes which were so
like a child’s, dim and glazing over, to draw a shivering sigh, to
utter a little whimper of distress in which there was the most piteous
meek resignation, and to make one final effort to drag himself nearer
for help and comfort to his master, in which the dog’s head fell
helplessly on Master Neville’s worn boot.
“Ah! has it come to this, my dog?” cried Master Neville, bending
hastily over the slightly convulsed limbs. “Poor little soul!” he said
to the creature which had no soul; “I would give much to lend the help
you ask;” and he groaned as his own misfortunes had never forced a
groan from his lips—not since another than Roy had appealed to him for
aid which he could not bestow.
In a second it was all over, and Reine, with an instinct of something
wrong about her motionless companion, had not only given over dancing,
but leaped scared into her master’s arms, to which he had bidden Roy in
vain.
It was only the death of a little dog to him who had lost wife and
children, house and lands, and position—who had seen the ghastly
horrors of battle-fields, and known his King lay down his head on the
block.
But at this moment his own powerlessness to save, together with his
loneliness, his utter loneliness, if Reine should die likewise, pressed
sorely on Master Neville. He saw once more the young bride he had
brought to the Alders, while the sound of his children’s pattering
feet came again into his ears. He looked back on the thoughtlessness
and vanity of his early manhood, on the hours he had wasted, and the
opportunities he had lost, never to return. He recalled words he
had heard Master Arundel say in the pulpit and out of it. He even
remembered what he had witnessed of the conviction of the Puritans,
that their God was ever with them to sustain and satisfy.
Master Neville gathered himself up, dug a hole in the ground with his
pocket-knife, and buried away Roy. He trudged on his road with Reine.
The very next day he heard of the long looked for means of leaving
England. He was successful in making his way to the seaport. He sailed
and reached Holland, where he found friends and assistance for his
destitution, till an adventurous soldier like Monk, chiming in with the
reactionary spirit of the hour, restored the King, and gave back to the
Cavaliers, who were in exile with him, their country, and what was left
of their possessions and careers.
Master Neville dwelt once more at the court, with Dame Hynd reinstated
as his housekeeper; but it could not be said of him, as it was recorded
of the royal Stewarts and Bourbons, that in their absence from their
kingdoms they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He was a more
sober-minded and gentler-hearted man for his troubles. One incident
which he never forgot was that half-hour in the wood when the ferns
were getting sere, and the leaves growing red and yellow—when Reine
danced and Roy died, and their master sat and looked on, a broken-down,
forlorn man.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]