18
Sir Charles Rutherford
Charles . . . what happened?” exclaimed Jocelyn as he climbed in beside her.
“Nothing.—Get us out of here,” he called brusquely to the driver.
“But your trowsers. And—good heavens! You’ve got a cut on the side of your head!”
But she could only get a scant account of the incident. He was in no mood to talk. It was too late to return to the hotel, he said. He would clean himself up as best he could, and see to his scrapes in one of the guest sitting rooms after reaching the palace.
They arrived without further incident.
Charles was able to make himself sufficiently presentable that he was confident no one would ask if he had fallen into a gutter on his way. Soon he was busy greeting his parliamentary colleagues and other dignitaries in attendance. The incident at least served one purpose—Jocelyn hardly thought about herself all day. She was too concerned for Charles. If the welt above his ear grew any larger, people were going to notice his face more than hers!
The atmosphere of the palace grounds was gay and festive.
Flowers bloomed abundantly in every direction one looked, every bed and walkway groomed to perfection. The expansive lawns and gardens were exquisitely manicured, not a weed in sight anywhere. Hedges bordered several theme gardens, one containing full-blooming rose bushes, another different species of dwarfed conifers and other trees, and a third a mazelike series of raised flower beds displaying more color per square inch than any other spot in the whole of London.
At two o’clock, Queen Victoria was honored by representatives of most countries in the Commonwealth, by the heads of several of England’s leading families, and by the kings and princes, queens and duchesses, chancellors and heads of state of several of the Continent’s nations. Many of her foreign relatives were present, as well as stage personalities and concert artists.
For most of the afternoon the queen traveled along the lawns in a victoria—a light, four-wheeled carriage with seat for two and perch for coachman—drawn by two greys. As she passed through the crowd, men bowed, women curtsied, and everyone looked happy. She then retired to a large tent set up for the occasion, filled with flowers, and wide open in the front so she could be seen. She had tea and toast, and readied herself to meet those upon whom she would confer special honor on this day.
As the hour of four o’clock approached, those who were to be recognized as knights assembled with their families outside the queen’s tent, waiting their turn to be taken inside by Lord Lathom, the Lord Chamberlain. Charles was easily the youngest by a decade. With Jocelyn and the children, he waited patiently behind three or four of his colleagues for his audience with the queen.
Jocelyn leaned over and adjusted Catharine’s cap, then straightened. Just for a moment her gloved hand strayed toward the side of her face. Then she lowered it, clasped her hands in front of her, and took a short, determined breath.
This day has not been easy for her, Charles realized with a little start. Sometimes I forget. . . . He reached over and touched her arm gently, and when their eyes met she gave him a weak smile.
At length they found themselves slowly approaching the tent across the red carpet which had been laid out before it. Victoria’s fifty-six-year-old son Edward, who would one day be King Edward VII, stood at his mother’s side—stoic, sturdy, and silent.
“Charles Rutherford, Esquire, Lord of the Manor of Heathersleigh,” came the formal announcement. “The order Knight Grand Commander!” Then came a brief, formal résumé of Charles’ accomplishments.
Charles walked forward with Jocelyn half a step behind him, holding little Catharine’s hand. George and Amanda followed. And then they were all standing before the grand lady.
The queen stretched out a white, slightly pudgy hand. He took it briefly, giving just the proper bow for the occasion.
“Lord Rutherford,” she said, and though her voice was soft, in it were contained the memory and mystery of countless centuries. “You bring esteem to your nation, and to your queen, by your achievements.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty. I am deeply honored.”
She tilted her head slightly, in acknowledgment.
“Your Majesty,” he said, “may I present my wife, Jocelyn . . .”
The queen’s glance drifted momentarily toward Jocelyn’s birthmark, then quickly found her eyes. The sight seemed to add a timber of tenderness to her tone as she spoke. “Lady Rutherford,” she said with a smile, “I am happy to meet you today.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” smiled Jocelyn.
“. . . and my son George and daughters Amanda and Catharine,” added Lord Rutherford.
George bowed, Catharine and Amanda curtsied. Victoria smiled at all three.
“I’m going to be prime minister someday!” announced Amanda confidently, looking brightly into the queen’s eyes.
The right side of Jocelyn’s face suddenly turned nearly as crimson as the left. How mortifying!
“Are you now, dear?” smiled Victoria. “—I had been told,” she added, turning to Amanda’s father with the hint of a playful grin, “that you were a progressive, Lord Rutherford. I even flatter myself that I may have been a trifle progressive in my early years. But I must admit your daughter’s statement goes a bit farther than even I am prepared to go. Does she come by such a notion from you?”
“No doubt I must admit to a certain role in her views,” replied Charles with a smile not quite successful in masking his embarrassment. “Yet there are times I do confess myself absolutely bewildered by what comes into her brain!”
“Well, I am sure she will turn the world on its ear when her time comes.—Won’t you, my dear?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” smiled Amanda brightly.
At a sign from the Lord Chamberlain beside the queen, Charles now knelt before her. A moment later he felt the delicate touch of the flat of the Sword of State upon first one shoulder then the other, held by the Lord Chamberlain with Victoria’s hand upon it. Tingles surged through him.
“Rise, Sir Charles,” she said.
This was the greatest of all England’s queens, he thought, and she had just conferred upon him the status of knighthood.
He rose and stepped back.
The queen turned. The Lord Chamberlain handed her a small package from a stack of several on the table behind her. She now handed it to Charles.
“I would like you to have this book,” she said. “It is one of my favorites. I have given copies to all my grandchildren. I have inscribed this one to you, in commemoration of this joyous day.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” replied the new knight. “My whole family shall treasure it.”
Victoria smiled briefly. Then it was over.
The new Sir Charles Rutherford and his family were led out of the tent, while the great lady occupied herself with the next of those who would receive like honor on this day. Charles and Jocelyn glanced at one another as they went, with silent expressions of mingled humor and horror at what had just transpired.
Amanda had always been unpredictable, but this one took the Yorkshire pudding!
19
Which Direction the Future?
An hour later, with the day’s formalities concluded, a group of three men had gathered and were chatting informally, sipping at the drinks they held in their hands.
It fell silent momentarily as they took notice of the interview in progress at the queen’s side on the dais. An elderly, white-haired man, in full military regalia, had just been shown a seat next to her.
“I say,” remarked the earl of Westcott, “isn’t that chap with Victoria there Bismarck?”
“The queen and the old Prussian chancellor chatting like old friends,” added Baron Whitfield. “I heard they weren’t inviting foreign dignitaries and royalty.”
“Some insisted on coming. I suppose they could hardly prevent it.”
“Who would have thought it?—Victoria and Bismarck. I daresay,
these are indeed changing times we live in.”
They watched the two aging rulers a moment with a silence bordering on reverence.
“The old guard is passing,” remarked Chalmondley Beauchamp, the third member of the trio.
“No doubt about it, Chalmondley,” rejoined Whitfield. “She’s seventy-eight . . . what’s the old man?”
“Bismarck must be close to eighty.—Ah, Charles,” exclaimed Beauchamp, seeing the new Sir Charles Rutherford approaching, “come join us!”
“Congratulations, my good man!” added Westcott, a liberal colleague from Parliament.
“Thank you, Max . . . Chalmondley . . . James,” he said, shaking hands with each of his colleagues in turn.
“We were just commenting on the queen’s guest of the moment.”
Rutherford turned and briefly took in the scene.
“Did you hear,” he said, “that the German Reichstag voted down a resolution to send the former chancellor birthday greetings two years ago, when he turned eighty?”
“Rather peevish of them, I would say,” observed Whitfield with customary English scorn.
“Yes, they’re quite a different breed,” added Westcott in like tone. “—If socialism ever takes root in Germany,” he added, a trifle more seriously, “I shudder to think what they might do with it!”
“Fortunately, it seems old Karl Marx made little impact on his own people, even if the Russian workers were quite fond of him.”
“Do you think anything will come of Marx’s view—communism, you know?”
“How can it? The thing’s totally impractical—peasants running the country, aristocrats and merchants digging ditches. It’s an absurd notion! The Frenchies tried it in their revolution back in 1789 and look what came of it—chaos.”
“It is a commentary on our times, is it not,” observed their friend, journalist Paxton Brentford, dryly—now joining the four with a nod of his head in the direction they had all been looking. “The two old war horses, Victoria and Bismarck, with the twenty-nine-year-old Russian tsar not far away—” He gave another nod of his head, this time in a different direction across the lawn. “All of them surrounded by a hodgepodge of English conservatives and socialists—a duke’s mixture, like you four.”
His listeners chuckled as Brentford spoke.
“Ah, my political colleagues,” he concluded, “the world is changing faster than any of us realize.”
“And we . . . we are changing . . .” began Charles, then paused as he became unaccountably distracted, “—and . . . and we . . . are changing with it,” he struggled to continue in his reply to what Paxton Brentford had just been saying.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. What had come over him!
“We will face the new century as a challenge,” he went on, his voice steady again. “We are the English, after all. We rule the world.”
“Spoken like a true champion for progress!” laughed Brentford, “even if you did fumble a bit over your words. What’s the trouble, Charles? You cannot still be nervous over meeting the queen?”
“No doubt that is it!” laughed Charles uneasily, wondering himself what had caused the lapse.
“But for how long will we rule the world?” asked Westcott. “We are being challenged on all fronts.”
“Tut, my good man—the British Empire shall endure forever,” confidently asserted Beauchamp, a Conservative M.P.
“What about the Russians?” interjected a young man, walking up and launching himself straightaway into the midst of the lively conversation. He appeared to be in his early twenties and wore the full garb of Her Majesty’s army.
“They are our allies—what about them?” said Beauchamp, turning toward him.
“There are allies, and then there are allies,” remarked Brentford.
“It is true, they may be a force to reckon with in the future,” put in Sir Charles. “The new ideas, in some respects, seem to be taking hold over there more rapidly than here.”
Again his concentration wavered. He heard the words from his own lips, and the voice sounded like his own, but a strange detachment from the conversation came over him, and his focus again lost sense of the conversation.
“In worrisome ways, however,” said the earl of Westcott. “They are a race that knows how to make change only through violence.”
“I don’t know if the Russian people are intelligent enough to know what to do with socialism if it bit them in the face,” remarked the newcomer.
“You had better keep your voice down, Churchill,” said Beauchamp. “The tsar’s here, you know. He’s practically family.”
“Nicholas II—he would be the first to agree with me,” rejoined the young army officer. “He’s nearly an Englishman himself, married to Victoria’s granddaughter, tutored by an Englishman.”
“Alexandra may be Victoria’s granddaughter, but she’s German, not English,” added Whitfield.
“And there, if you ask me,” commented Beauchamp, “is the real problem—the Germans, not the Russians.”
“The Germans are a sensible lot,” said Churchill. “They don’t go in for these revolutionary ideas.”
“Perhaps not, but they are a people skilled in battle,” rejoined the count. “Bismarck will not be the last of the Teutonic race who makes war, I daresay.”
The new knight tried to keep up his share of the conversation and focus on what the others were saying. But the words of those around him continued to grow fuzzy in Charles Rutherford’s brain. He heard the sounds of the reception fading distantly away and becoming faint in his ears. He was there with his friends, but not there.
Even as the voices of his companions dimmed, another conversation—unsought, unwelcome—intruded into his consciousness. . . .
————
I can’t thank you enough . . . a strange voice was saying in the ears of his mind, . . . don’t know what we would have done . . .
Charles Rutherford tried to rid his brain of the memory.
But now came two eyes to join the voice—silent, imploring, sad eyes . . . eyes that betrayed shock at what they had just witnessed.
With steely resolve, Charles closed his own eyes for the briefest of instants, forcing the apparition from him. He drew in a quick reassuring breath.
————
“Wouldn’t you agree, Charles?” the baron was asking.
Hearing his name broke the reverie.
In the mere second that had passed, Charles’ brain had taken a long journey inward in the direction of his conscience. Confusion was his initial response.
“Uh . . . oh, yes—right,” he floundered unevenly. “German through and through,” he said, doing his best to shake off the lapse of concentration.
“I say, old man,” said Baron Whitfield, “are you quite all right? I daresay, you seem a bit off your game for such a high point in one’s career.”
“Yes . . . yes—quite fine, thank you, Max,” replied Charles. He attempted a laugh. “The day’s just, you know, been too much for me, I suppose.”
The baron nodded, but did not seem altogether convinced. Meanwhile the conversation continued.
“Tut, tut. I still maintain Nicholas is secure,” commented Beauchamp with all the assurance of his Tory bearing.
“I say, Churchill,” now put in Brentford, changing the subject, “when are you going to stand for the Commons like your father?”
“After my father’s problems in Parliament,” laughed Churchill, “I don’t know that I ever shall.”
He turned to Charles in a sideways gesture, drew his hand to his mouth, and said in pretended confidence but loudly enough for all to hear, “—and if I was planning a political move,” he added, “I would not announce it in the hearing of a newsman looking for a story!”
Everyone laughed, Brentford loudest of all. He could take a good joke, even when it was at his own expense.
————
Amid the laughter which faded eerily away, unsought voices and imag
es again forced their way back into Sir Charles’ brain.
He had hardly heard Churchill’s joking aside.
Again the young lady’s eyes stared at him, haunting him with their pleading, sorrowful expression of pain. Why was he suddenly so ill at ease? What could account for it?
He had saved the young lady from a ruffian.
Why did he feel such an overpowering sense of condemnation? What was it about her eyes that possessed such power to wound him? Her expression made him feel that a knife had been plunged into his heart!
20
A Changing World
Brentford was speaking once more to young Winston Churchill. “So,” he said, “you’ve been off fighting the Spaniards in Cuba, I understand.”
The young man nodded.
“Careful, young man,” chided Westcott. “He’s after an interview!”
“You forget that I’m a newsman too,” smiled the young soldier. “I can handle myself.—Actually,” he went on to the journalist in his gravelly voice, “since then I’ve been on two campaigns in the northwest frontier of India.”
“You do travel about!”
“One follows orders, Baron Whitfield.”
“Even when one is the grandson of the seventh duke of Marlborough?”
The young Churchill smiled, but did not reply.
“Where are you off to next?” asked Westcott.
“I have been engaged as a correspondent for the London Morning Post,” answered Churchill. “There is talk of my joining General Kitchener in the Sudan.”
“Ah, the Morning Post—my competition!” lamented Brentford.
With great effort Sir Charles forced himself to concentrate. This was not how I envisioned this day, Charles thought. This was his moment of triumph. Yet he felt as if he were losing his mind trying to keep his attention focused!
Once more the conversation drifted back to a discussion of the changing world situation. Charles was happy to let the others carry it. He took another sip of the wine from the glass in his hand. Perhaps he had had a little too much of it. That must be it! The wine had muddled the clarity of his brain.
Wild Grows the Heather in Devon Page 12