E-text prepared by Martin Pettit and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)
Note: The other authors to whom this work is attributed are
John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T. Wheelwright.
THE KING'S MEN
A Tale of To-Morrow
ROBERT GRANT, ET AL.
Copyright, 1884, by
Robert Grant.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. RIPON HOUSE, 1
II. RICHARD LINCOLN, 8
III. MY LADY'S CHAMBER, 19
IV. JARLEY JAWKINS, 32
V. "JAWKIN'S JOLLITIES," 46
VI. THE ROYALISTS, 67
VII. A FOUR-IN-HAND AND ONE IN THE BUSH, 85
VIII. SPRETAE INJURIA FORMAE, 97
IX. "THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE," 110
X. KING GEORGE THE FIFTH, 124
XI. THE RAISING OF THE FLAG, 147
XII. IN THE LION'S MOUTH, 161
XIII. AN UNFINISHED TASK, 174
XIV. THE LAST ROYALIST, 180
XV. LOVE LAUGHS AT LOCKSMITHS, 193
XVI. MRS. CAREY'S HUSBAND, 215
XVII. AT THE COURT OF ST. JAMES, 225
XVIII. TWO CARDS PLAYED, 243
XIX. A WOMAN'S END, 252
XX. "FROM CHAIN TO CHAIN," 258
XXI. NULLA VESTIGA RETRORSUM, 265
THE KING'S MEN.
CHAPTER I.
RIPON HOUSE.
There are few Americans who went to England before the late wars but
will remember Ripon House. The curious student of history--a study,
perhaps, too little in vogue with us--could find no better example of
the palace of an old feudal lord. Dating almost from the time of the
first George--and some even say it was built by the same Wren who
designed that St. Paul's Cathedral whose ruins we may still see to the
east of London--it frowned upon the miles of private park surrounding
it, a marble memorial of feudal monopoly and man's selfish greed. The
very land about it, to an extent of almost half a county, was owned by
the owners of the castle, and by them rented out upon an annual payment
to such farmers as they chose to favor with a chance to earn their
bread.
In an ancient room of a still older house which stands some two miles
from the castle, and had formerly been merely the gatekeeper's lodge
(though large enough for several families), a young man was sitting,
one late afternoon in early November. The room was warmed by a fire, in
the old fashion; and the young man was gloomily plunging the poker into
the coals, breaking them into oily flakes which sent out fierce
flickerings as they burned away. He was dressed in a rough shooting suit
of blue velveteen, and his heavy American shoes were crusted with mud.
His handsome, boyish face wore an expression of deep anxiety; and his
hands seemed to minister to the troubles of his meditation by tumbling
his hair about the contracted forehead, while his lips closed about a
short brier-wood pipe of a kind only used by men. The pipe had gone out,
unnoticed by the smoker; and he did not seem to mind the fierce heat
thrown out by the broken coals. Above the mantel was the portrait of a
gentleman in the quaint costume of the latter Victorian age; the absurd
starched collar and shirt, the insignificant cravat, the trousers
reaching to the ankles, and the coat and waistcoat of black cloth and
fantastic cut, familiar to the readers of the London _Punch_. This
antedated worthy looked out from the canvas upon the room as if he owned
it; and the mullioned windows and carved oak wainscoting justified his
claim, even to the very books in the bookcases, which showed an
antiquarian taste. Here were the strange old-fashioned satires of
Thackeray and the more modern romances of the humorist Dickens; the
crude speculations of the philosopher Spencer, and the one-sided,
aristocratic economies of Malthus and Mill; with the feeble rhymes of
Lord Tennyson d'Eyncourt, which men, in a time-serving age, called
poetry.
Geoffrey Ripon had come to his last legs. And he was one of the few
aristocrats of his generation who had ever (metaphorically speaking)
had any legs worth considering. When O'Donovan Rourke had been President
of the British Republic, that good-natured Irishman, who had been at
school with Ripon's father, had given him a position in the legation at
Paris; but when the Radicals overthrew Rourke's government, Ripon lost
his place. And Ripon could not but think it hard that he, Geoffrey
Ripon, by all right and law Earl of Brompton, Viscount Mapledurham in
the peerage of Ireland, etc., etc., should that afternoon have been
fined ten shillings and costs for poaching on what had been his own
domain.
His great-uncle looked down upon him with that exasperating equanimity
that only a canvas immortality can give--his great-uncle who fell on the
field of Tel-el-Kebir, dead as if the Arab bullet had sped from a
worthier foe, in the days when England had a foreign policy and could
spare her soldiers from the coast defence. And his grandfather, who
smirked from another coroneted frame behind him, had been a great leader
in the Liberal party under Gladstone, Lord Liverpool, the grand old man
who stole Beaconsfield's thunder to guard the Suez Canal, that road to
India which he, like another Moses, had made for their proud legions
through the Red Sea.
And now Ripon was living in his porter's lodge, all that was still his
of the great Ripon estates, with his empty title left him, minus the
robes and coronet no longer worn; and his King, George the Fifth, an
exile, wandering with his semblance of a court in foreign lands.
The world moves quickly as it grows older, with an accelerated velocity,
like that of a falling stone; and it is hard for us of the present day
to picture the England of King Albert Edward. The restlessness and
poverty of the masses; the agitations in Ireland, feebly, blindly
protesting with dynamite and other rude weapons against foreign
oppression; the shameful monopoly of land, the social haughtiness of the
titled classes, the luxury and profligacy of the court--perhaps even at
the opening of our story, poor England was hardly worse off. But then
came the change. Gradually the bone and sinew of the country sought
refuge in emigration. The titled classes, after mortgage upon mortgage
of their valueless land, were forced to break their entails to sell
their estates. And at last, when the great American Republic, in 1889,
cut down the Chinese wall of protection, which so long had surrounded
their country, even trade succumbed, and England was under-sold in the
markets of the world. Then retrenchment was the cry; universal suffrage
elected a parliament which literally cut off the royal princes with a
shilling; and the Premier Bradlaugh swamped the House of Lords by the
creation of a battalion of life peers, who abolished the hereditary
House and established an elective Senate. It was easy then to call a
constitutional convention, declare the sovereign but the servant and
figure-head of the people, confiscate the royal estates and vote King
Albert a salary of L10,000 a year.
Then Russia took advantage of the great struggle between Germany and
France to seize India, and after the terrible defeat at Cyprus and the
siege of Calcutta the old King of England abdicated in favor of his
grandson George. But the people clamored for an elective President, and
it was nigh twenty years before the opening of our story that King
George had been forced to seek his only safe refuge in America.
Thus it was that Geoffrey Ripon had come to depend on poaching and the
garden stuff his old servant managed to raise in the two-acre lot
surrounding the lodge. Almost the only modern things in his room were
the guns and fishing tackle in the corners and the electric battery for
charging the cartridges; and now he was judicially informed that he must
poach no more, the mortgage had been finally foreclosed, and he looked
out of his window upon lands no longer his even in name. It is a sad
thing to be ruined, and if ever man was ruined beyond all hope, Geoffrey
Ripon, Earl of Brompton, was the man; it is hard to feel you are the
last of your race, that you are almost an outlaw in your own land--and
Ripon's king, George the Fifth, was suffered to play out his idle play
of royal state, in Boston, Massachusetts. Ripon had never been in
America. He pushed back his chair from the fire, as it gave out a heat
too great for any man to stand. He walked to the window, and stood
looking out upon the long perspective of elms, where the avenue
stretched away in the direction of Ripon House. As his eye wandered over
the broad view of park and forest, a carriage, drawn by four horses,
insolent in the splendor of its trappings, rolled toward him from the
castle. In that moment it seemed to Ripon that he felt all the
bitterness of hatred and envy that might have rankled in the hearts of
all the poor wayfarers who had in eight hundred years peered through the
park gate and looked at those broad acres that his race so long had
held. The carriage rolled swiftly by him, with a glitter of silver
harness and liveries; on one seat were an elderly man and a young girl.
As he saw her face Ripon started in surprise. Then, after a moment, he
walked to the table and filled his pipe.
"Bah!" he said to himself, "it cannot be possible." Again he threw
himself on a chair by the fireplace, and tried to read the _Saturday
Review_. There was a long leader against Richard Lincoln; but as Lincoln
was the one member in the House for whom Geoffrey had any respect, he
threw it aside in disgust. He heard a timid knock at the door.
"Come in!" growled Geoffrey, as he turned to light his pipe.
An old family servant, the last survivor of an extinct race, entered
with a battered silver tray.
"Please, my lord, a letter from the persons at the castle; one of them
is waiting for an answer."
Reynolds made no distinction between the "persons at the castle" and
their servants; and he always called it the castle, now that Ripon House
was the gatekeeper's lodge.
"I suppose," grunted Geoffrey, as he took the letter, "they want to warn
me against poaching. So considerate, after I have been fined ten
shillings by their gamekeeper."
To his surprise the letter had a familiar look; it was addressed to him
by his title in the ancient fashion, and was in a handwriting which he
thought he should have known in Paris. Tearing open the envelope, he
read:
"MY DEAR LORD BROMPTON: I hear that you are back to your own
estate, and you will doubtless be surprised to learn that I am so
near you. Papa telephoned over last week for an estate, and here we
are, with a complete retinue of servants and a gallery of
ancestors--yours, by the way, as I found to my surprise. I felt so
sorry when they called you back from Paris; I had no idea I should
see you again so soon. Papa wanted to look after his affairs in
England; so we have come over again for the winter, and I was
delighted to get out of the wild gayety of America for this dear
sleepy old country.
"If you have nothing better to do, will you dine with us to-morrow
night? Do not stay away because we are in your old family house. We
have no such feelings in America, you know. Richard Lincoln will be
here, and Sir John Dacre. Do you know Sir John? I admire him
immensely, you must know.
"Sincerely yours,
"MARGARET WINDSOR."
"P. S. The new minister and legation are not received in society.
We missed you so much."
"Maggie Windsor over here," thought Ripon, "with that curious old father
of hers, taking Ripon House as if it were furnished lodgings." And he
thought of the old house and of his great-uncle who fell at
Tel-el-Kebir, and of King George over the sea in America. But he said to
himself that Maggie Windsor was a nice girl, as he put out his pipe and
went out into the park for a walk.