mistaken in your voice. It penetrated upstairs to my chamber, and I
judged by the sound of it that our landlord was putting you off. I was
half expecting you to-night.”
The visitor greeted the King in the curious manner that the singular
circumstances demanded. While he contrived to throw a vast amount of
respect into his demeanour, he shot a number of questioning glances
from the King’s face to that of the landlord. Plainly he was wishing
to be advised of how much Gamaliel actually knew concerning the King’s
identity.
“The murder is out,” said the King, laughing. “There are no longer any
secrets between Boniface and ourselves.”
“Then, Sire,” said the Colonel, “permit me to say that I think mine
host to be a very honest fellow. Landlord, you did well to conceal the
whereabouts of the King from one who was a total stranger to you. You
exercised a rare discretion, landlord, and I am sure his Majesty will
not be in the least likely to forget it.”
“By my faith! yes,” said the King, heartily; and then added frankly:
“After all, I believe I have done less than justice to our Boniface.”
The landlord bowed low. His ears tingled to hear his praises sung. He
felt it to be a somewhat ironical world, however. The sweat burst out
of the roots of his hair; he knew what Judas Iscariot felt like, of
old, when he sat at the Last Supper.
“Sire,” said the visitor, “all the arrangements are made and the
coast is clear. I am assured that there are no Roundheads nearer than
Woolden Magna, a hamlet some fifteen miles along the coast. To-night,
therefore, under the cover of the darkness, you will be able to push on
to Titcomb Place, the house of Mr. John Pocock. You will there be able
to lie in a better security. You will be able to wash your face, Sire,
and adopt a raiment less out of keeping with your condition.”
“My present one is by no means out of keeping with my condition,
Colonel,” said the King, with a sudden bitterness. “The condition of a
dog is that of a gentleman by comparison.”
The Colonel sighed; his grizzled face was full of distress.
“A little patience, Sire,” he said gently. “In a few short days you
will no longer have need to fear your enemies. I would recommend, Sire,
that you come with me now to Titcomb Place. It is but three miles along
the rocks, and we must go on foot. I have brought no horses, as the way
is devious. Mr. Pocock hath everything in readiness for your reception,
and I am sure, Sire, you will lie in perfect comfort and security for
one night at least.”
The landlord hung upon the King’s reply. After all, was he to be balked
by the King’s going ere the soldiers could reach him?
“My dear Colonel,” said the King, with his customary diffidence, “not
to-night, I think. I am in no mood to leave my quarters here. I am
perfectly snug and content; and as you say, our Boniface hath already
given an earnest of his honesty. Besides, we have had more than enough
of the night air of late. This evening we propose to give ourselves a
holiday. Despite our attire and the walnut juice that discolours our
countenance, we have a warm and snug chamber at our disposal upstairs,
and the society is most amiable. My poor young Lord Farnham lies there
of a bullet wound, a memorial of the melancholy Third, and his adorable
Countess is there to nurse him.”
“Ah, Sire!” said the Colonel, wagging a playful finger at the King.
“Further argument of mine is superfluous, I fear. Mr. Pocock cannot
hope to compete with my Lady Farnham. And, after all, Sire, I do not
think it matters greatly where you lie this evening. The enemy do not
seem to be very active in this neighbourhood. Landlord, you have no
reason to fear their appearance to-night, I trow?”
“I do not think, sir, that they are at all likely to inconvenience his
Majesty to-night,” said the landlord.
His voice was prompt, hard and dry. He hoped God would forgive him.
But, after all, he was a poor man; he was not a personal friend of the
King’s; and he had never pretended to a particular interest in the
species.
“Very well, Sire, we will leave it at that,” said the Colonel. “I will
return here early to-morrow morning, and, if all is well, I will then
conduct you to Titcomb Place.”
“Excellent, my good Colonel,” said the King, accompanying the most
faithful friend of his wanderings, Colonel Francis Wyndham, to the
kitchen door. He waved a frank adieu to him as he departed into the
night. The King then returned upstairs.
The landlord breathed again. Having seen the end of that matter, he
looked at the clock. It was now five minutes past seven. Say one hour
more, if all went well. One short hour, and the agony of his suspense
would be at an end. Nay, not that; rather it would be coming to its
heat and violence. The full force of it would be when the men he had
sent for were face to face with the persons upstairs.
He could hardly endure that thought. The nearer the time approached,
the more certain the landlord became that it was going to be a terrible
business. On his life he was not a coward, but another evening of this
kind and he felt he must inevitably become one. Before God, he was
not a coward, but the manner in which his wild heart beat up into his
throat was enough to choke him.
He could not sit still. He rose from his chair and went hobbling up
and down the kitchen as before. All his physical infirmities had gone
out of him. They had been replaced by those of his mind. He said again
he was no coward; but he was certain that in his present shaken state
anything might happen to him. If those soldiers began to whirl their
pikes or discharge their pieces, or the woman began to scream, or
particularly if he saw so much as a drop of blood, he must run forth
out of the house, and hide his eyes and his ears until all was over.
It was a pity that soldiers were concerned in the business at all.
They were so ruthless; their wicked profession left them absolutely
destitute of a sense of delicacy. He had always had a rooted aversion
to soldiers.
It was now twenty minutes past seven. The wretched clock in the corner
seemed to stand still. His heart ticked out the minutes, but the clock
in the corner seemed to refuse to record them. Its inaction mocked
him. Still, after all, he was not sure he was not relieved to find the
hour was not later. He was not fit to grapple with the worst. A respite
was not unwelcome.
At this moment there came a knock on the kitchen door. The landlord
inwardly cursed his visitor, whoever he might be. This was not a night
for visitors. There had been one already; a pretty undesirable one,
too. True, he had proved more than a match for him; with this one he
must prove the same. Still, it was a little unreasonable for anyone
short of Captain Culpeper, who, to be sure, would not have stayed to
knock, to obtrude himself at such a crisis in his life--nay, at such a
crisis in the destiny of nations.
Filled with the unction of his previous success, the landlord hobbled
boldly to the door and opened it. The apparition waiting upon the
threshold seemed to have stepped bodily out of one of Gamaliel’s
wildest nightmares. It was the elderly mariner in the dogskin cap.
There he stood, with the earrings in his ears; the same malignant,
humorous leer in his face. The scar across it shone white in the
brightness of the kitchen fire; the naked knife at his waist was
shining too. And, above all, his two great brown paws looked more
knotted and gnarled than ever.
“A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate,” said Diggory Fargus.
“Same to you,” said the landlord, awkwardly.
With no better invitation, the sailor lurched into the kitchen, assumed
a seat by the fire, as on the previous occasion of his coming, and
asked for a go of rum. The landlord ordered the serving-maid to bring
it to him. The sailor tasted it deliberately when it was given to
him, warmed his hands, and then cocked his one ugly eye across at the
landlord. In spite of himself Gamaliel shivered. His awe of this rude
mariner was in the last degree absurd; but there it was. His native
delicacy was doubtless too great for him to be entirely at his ease in
the society of these rude characters.
“I am here, mate, about that young man I mentioned to ye the other
evenin’,” said the mariner. “Have ye seen him yet?”
In an instant the landlord, afraid as he was of this fellow, arrived at
the conclusion that his presence in that house was not at all required.
The sooner he was quit of him the better. The young man he sought might
very possibly be upstairs; he might prove to be either my Lord Farnham
or the King; but things were very well as they were. This Diggory
Fargus could not improve them; he might very possibly undo them though.
“I have seen no young man,” said Gamaliel shortly. “And I don’t much
want to see one. This is a peaceable and honest inn.”
“I never said it weren’t,” said the mariner. “But have you had any
comp’ny, mate, these three days?”
“None to speak of,” said the landlord.
“Have you got any now?” asked the mariner.
“I have not,” said the landlord.
“Then, mate,” said the mariner, spitting freely amongst the logs on
the hearth, “you’re a liar.”
That was so trite a fact to Gamaliel, that he did not attempt to
contradict it. He was not a little disconcerted by it, however.
“Now I’ll tell ye, mate, how I know ye’re a liar,” said the sailor,
with a slow anger that made him far more formidable than an outburst
would have done. “The candles are comin’ through the chinks in the
shutters of that front chamber over the sign. Perhaps ye’ll tell me
that that don’t mean comp’ny; but in any case Diggory Fargus is a-going
up to look with his own blessed deadlight, and ye can lay to that,
mate.”
Without condescending to parley further with the landlord, who had
plainly none of his confidence, Diggory Fargus got up from the fire and
lurched to the stairs.
“What are you about, man?” said the landlord excitedly. “It is no place
for you, up there! There are lords and ladies up there.”
“I knew you were a liar,” said the grimly satisfied mariner. “Lords and
ladies, is they? Well, like as not, that’s just who I’ve come to see.
What moight be their names, mate?”
The landlord, seeing that it was hopeless to throw more dust in the
shrewd sailor’s eye, submitted with the best grace he could summon.
“Well, there’s my Lord Farnham for one,” he said.
“My Lord Farnham, is there?” said the sailor. “Well, mate, I calls
that sing’lar, seein’ as how my Lord Farnham is the very young man I’m
wantin’.”
“I will conduct you to him, then,” said the landlord.
He had lost the game; but he spoke as cheerfully and obligingly as he
could, for he was keenly desirous to propitiate this ugly devil of a
mariner. Besides, one sailor more or less did not matter much at this
stage. The time was growing very short. The hoofs of the soldiers’
horses would soon be heard on the road. Diggory Fargus or ten Diggory
Farguses would then be of no avail.
The landlord put his best leg foremost, and led the sailor up the
rickety stairs to the chamber where the King sat in the society of the
Earl of Farnham and his Countess. He knocked a little timidly upon the
door.
“Enter,” said the frank voice of the King.
“If it please your Majesty and your lordship and your ladyship,”
said the landlord, putting his nose on his belly again, deeming that
etiquette demanded it of him, “there is here a sailor-man to see my
lord.”
“Let us have a look at him,” said the King, scenting some little
diversion.
“Which be my Lord Farnham, mate?” said the mariner, addressing the
King bluffly. He was a plain man himself, and the landlord’s elaborate
flummeries rather increased the directness of his manners.
“The pale gentleman lying in his bed,” said the King.
“Are you the master of the little vessel that Colonel Phelips promised
to engage for my lord?” asked Lady Farnham.
“Ay, ay, ma’am,” said the mariner. “She’ve been lying three days past
in Pyler’s Cove, a short sea-mile up the beach. When I was here a day
or so agone, ye hadn’t touched this port. I should ha’ come last night
again, but we couldn’t ha’ put to sea in sich a gale as that.”
“I was expecting you anxiously,” said Lady Farnham. “Indeed, so anxious
did I become, that in the middle of the night I went forth to seek you,
but saw you not.”
“I daresay I was under hatches then,” said the sailor. “But to-night
at ten o’clock the wind and tide should be fair enough. We can get off
then.”
A great hope suddenly beaconed in the woman’s face.
“Oh! if you can, good sailor,” she exclaimed, impulsively, “I shall
never be able to requite you.”
Even as she spoke, however, there came a thought that dashed it to the
earth. There was her husband. He was too weak to move.
“My lord is stricken,” she said. “He cannot walk a step. What is to be
done, good sailor?”
The mariner scratched his head.
“Don’t ye fret about that, ma’am,” he said. “Diggory Fargus hath run
too many cargoes in precarious plazen to be beat by a thing like that.
I’ll bring three o’ my mates along wi’ a litter, at half-past nine o’
the clock. We should be able to bear the gentleman easy if we takes our
time.”
“It is well thought on,” said the King.
“At half-past nine of the clock then, good sailor,” said the lady,
fervently. “And may God requite you for your services. We will be in
readiness.”
Diggory Fargus pulled his forelock and went downstairs in the company
of the nervous landlord.
“Oh, Sire,” said the poor lady--the tears were come into her eyes,--“it
is indeed a providence that the sailor is here at such a time. Wilt
thou not come with us, too? Something clearly told me that if you spent
this night, Sire, under this roof, you would be ta’en.”
“Madam, you are more than kind,” said the King, complaisantly. “We
will consider it. Although we think we must not disappoint our other
friends. They, too, have a boat chartered for us somewhere. But we
shall see. On the one hand is our duty; on the other, our inclination.”
There was no misreading the lustre in the King’s face.
[Illustration:
CHAPTER
XIII
_The Soldiers_]
When the landlord had carefully and thankfully seen the sailor out of
his house, he looked at the clock as one hardly daring to do so. It was
still twenty minutes past seven. The landlord recoiled from it with a
shock. He was in that state of tension which rejects the simple and
natural. He was either dreaming a wild dream, or he was face to face
with the supernatural. In his present extreme condition, both seemed
possible.
All at once it then occurred to Gamaliel that the clock had stopped.
Whatever had come upon him? Of course it was Friday evening, and for
the first time in forty years the hour for winding it up had gone by
unheeded. Almost savagely, so moved by a contemptuous anger was the
landlord against himself, he took the key in his feverish hands, and
strove to wind it up and set it again in motion. His attempts were
pitiful. The key refused to obey his faltering hand, and wandered
all over the face of the clock. The palsy of terror was already
communicated to his limbs.
The clock was wound at last. He set the pendulum again in motion, and
it recommenced sonorously to tick. Even then, however, the landlord was
no nearer the end of his suspense. He did not know how long the clock
had stopped, and in all the house it was the only thing he had to tell
the time by. Could anything have been more distracting or inopportune
than his forgetfulness?
By hook or by crook he must obtain the time. To be ignorant of it at
that hour was more than flesh and blood could endure. He would go
upstairs and ask the King.
In the greatest trepidation of body and spirit, he climbed the stairs.
When he got to the top he stood irresolutely, with his knuckles poised
against the chamber door. He felt that, even supposing the power was
vouchsafed him to knock upon the panels, he would still be unable to
address the King. His mouth was like a lime pit; his tongue stuck in
it, no longer susceptible of control.
He was physically incapable of addressing the King. He would try to ask
Lady Farnham. He knocked fiercely upon the door, for to do so with the
deliberation of cold blood was impossible. He was bidden to enter.
The landlord did not know how he got into the chamber. He was certainly
not conscious that it was by the agency of his feet. But suddenly he
found himself staring wide-mouthed at his guests, with never a word
to give them. They plainly expected one, yet his tongue stuck in his
mouth; he was unable to utter a syllable.
“Hath our Boniface seen a ghost?” said the King’s voice. “I declare
he hath the pallor and inanimation of death without the peace of it.
Speak, good fellow. What ails thee?”
The landlord quivered from head to foot, but speak he could not. The
King’s voice was the last straw. He tottered back against the wall.
“Oh, what doth ail the poor man?” said the compassionate lady. “Look
how his eyes stare, and see how the sweat pours from him! And he can
scarce stand upon his legs. I am sure it is some grievous malady. Can
it be poison, thinkest thou?”
“Speak, good landlord,” said the King. “What doth ail thee?”
The King’s voice was utterly too much for the landlord. His struggles
to speak ended in his shaking a few harsh sobs out of his dry throat.
He then began to whimper like a child.
His three auditors stared at him with looks of genuine pity and alarm.
“I declare,” said the King, “I never saw anybody so overcome before.
Something must be done for the poor fellow. I think we had better
summon his son.”
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.