The steward smiled again. “If you knew him, sir, you would not fear for him on that account;” and he continued, “You will return with me to England?”
“Yes, but not now,” I exclaimed, for all at once a new resolve had taken shape within my mind. There was no word in the will about my politics. Sir John was acquainted with them when he made the will. I was free to use Blackladies as I chose.
“Wait you here in Paris,” I cried to the steward, and came of a sudden to an awkward pause. “You brought money with you?” I asked.
“I have an order upon Mr. Waters the banker,” he replied.
“Good,” I said, my spirits rising with my voice. “Get it cashed — now, at once, and bring the money back to me. But be quick, be quick. For I have business in Lorraine.”
“In Lorraine?” exclaimed the steward, and his face flashed to an excitement equal with my own.
“In Lorraine,” I repeated, “and at Bar-le-Duc.”
He waited for no further explanation, but made his reverence to the rector, a low bow to me, and departed on his errand. I began to pace impatiently about the room, already looking for his return, even as I heard him pass beneath the window.
“Was I not right, my son?” asked the rector. “You walk, you speak, like a man refreshed. And yet — and yet — —”
He came over to me and laid a hand upon my shoulder, while a great gravity overspread his face, and somehow at the touch of his hand, at the mere sight of his face, my overweening confidence burst like a bubble. For looking through my eyes he seemed to search my soul, and in his eyes I seemed to see, as in a mirror, the naked truth of all the folly that he noted there.
“These are the last words,” he went on, “which I shall speak to the pupil, and I would have you bear them as the crest and motto of your life. I would have you beware of a feverish zeal. To each man I do solemnly believe there comes one hour of greatness, and only one. It is not the hour of supreme happiness, or of a soaring fortune, as worldlings choose to think, but the hour when God tries him upon His touchstone. And for that hour each man must watch if he would not fail. Indeed, it brings the test which proves — nay, makes — him man, and in God’s image, too, or leaves him lower than the brutes; for he has failed. Therefore watch! No man knoweth the hour of God’s coming. Therefore watch! But how shall he watch” — and his voice to my hearing had in it some element of prophecy— “how shall he watch who swings ever from elation to despair, and knows no resting-place between them?”
He spoke very quietly, and so left me alone. I do not know that I am inclined now to set great store upon the words. They seem almost to present some such theory as children and men over-occupied with book-learning are wont to fondle. But after he had left me alone, I sat with his discourse overlaying me like an appalling shadow. The sunlight in the court without lost its brightness; the very room darkened within. I saw my whole life before me, a procession of innumerable hours. Hooded and cloaked, they passed me with silent feet. I sought to distinguish between them. I chose at random from amongst them. “This,” I cried, in a veritable fear— “this is the hour;” and even as I spoke, one that had passed threw back the hood and turned on me a sorrowing face. So would the hour come, and so unready should I be to challenge it! My fear swelled to a panic; it bore me company all that day as I made my purchases in the streets, as I took leave of my companions, as I passed out of the Porte St. Antoine. It was with me, too, in the quiet evening long after the spires of Paris had vanished behind me, when I was riding with my steward at my back across that open country of windmills and poplar trees on the highroad to Lorraine.
CHAPTER IV.
AND MEET. I CROSS TO ENGLAND AND HAVE A STRANGE ADVENTURE ON THE WAY.
FOR THE STEWARD rode with me, though I barely remarked his presence until we had ridden some ten miles. Then, however, I called him to my side.
“I bade you wait at Paris for my return,” I said, and I reined in my horse. He followed my example, but with so evident a disappointment that I forgave him his disobedience on the instant.
“You left no word, sir, as to the date of your return, or where I should look for you,” he explained, readily enough.
“Besides,” I added, with a laugh, “I ride to Bar-le-Duc, is it not so?” and I allowed him to continue with me, bethinking me at the same time that I might inform myself the sooner concerning Blackladies and the politics of the county. Upon these points he gave me information, which inclined me in his favour. The northern counties, as far south as Derbyshire, were so much tinder. It needed but a spark to set them ablaze from one coast to the other. I was ready to listen to as much talk of that kind as he could pour into my ears, and indeed he did not stint me of it; so that, liking his story, I began in a short while to like the man who told it, and to hold myself lucky that I was possessed of a steward whose wishes so jumped with his service.
He had been born on the estate, he told me, some thirty years since, and had been reared there, though, thanks to the kindness of his late master, my uncle, he had received a better schooling than his father before him. He spoke, indeed, very correctly for a servant, but with a broadish accent and a clipping of his the’s, as the natives of that district are used to do. But for my part I never got the tang of it, and so make no effort to reproduce it here. He was called Leonard Ashlock.
In his company I journeyed, then, the fifty-eight leagues to Bar-le-Duc, where I seemed all at once to have come into my own country without the trouble of crossing over seas. For as I rode through the narrow streets, it was the English tongue that I heard spoken on every side, though more often with a Scotch or an Irish accent. But the one whom I came to seek I did not find. The Chevalier, they told me, had gone to Commercy. So to Commercy we travelled eastwards after him for another eight leagues or so, and arrived there towards the close of the afternoon on the next day.
We rode straight to the Toison D’or, the chief inn of the town, and while I was dismounting in the courtyard, I noticed a carriage, which was ranged, all dirtied and muddy, against an angle of the wall. I stepped over and examined it. There was a crest upon the panels.
I turned to the ostler.
“When did the carriage come?”
“This morning.”
“And monsieur?”
“He is within, I think.”
I ran up the steps into the house and fell plump against a girl who was carrying some glasses and a jug upon a tray. She gave a little scream; the tray struck me on the chest; there was jingle of broken glass, and a jugful of claret was streaming down my breeches and soaking about my knees.
“Monsieur is in?” I asked.
“Stupid!” she said, with a stamp of the foot.
“Monsieur is in?” I asked again.
“Booby,” says she, and caught me a swinging box on the ears.
“I beg your pardon,” said I, and I ran up the stairs. A footman stood beside the door on the landing, and I knew the man.
“Ah,” said I, “he is here.”
The footman advanced a step towards me.
“My lord is busy.”
“He will see me.”
“I have the strictest orders, sir.”
I pushed past the fellow and hammered at the door. It was thrown open from the inside, and Lord Bolingbroke stood anxiously in the door.
“Good morning,” said I, airily. “It is a roundabout journey, this of yours to Dauphiné;” and while he stared and frowned at me I stepped past him into the room. In the window opposite there stood a man with his back towards me — a man of a slender and graceful figure, plainly dressed in a suit of black velvet. He turned hastily as I stumbled across the threshold, and in a twinkling I knew what I had done. There was no mistaking the long, melancholic features, the gentle aspect of long-suffering. His race was figured in the mould of his lineaments, and the sad history of his race was written in his eyes.
I dropped upon my knees.
“Your Majesty,” I stammered out; and again, “your
Majesty.”
He took a step eagerly towards me. I felt the claret trickling down my legs.
“You bring pressing news,” he exclaimed; and then he checked himself and his voice dropped to despondency. “But it will be bad news. Not a doubt of that! ’Tis always bad news that comes in such hurry;” and he turned to Bolingbroke with the saddest laugh. “Bad news, my lord, I’ll warrant.”
“Nay, your Majesty,” I answered, “I bring no news at all;” and I glanced helplessly at Bolingbroke, who, having closed the door, now stood on one side, midway between King James and myself. How I envied him his easy bearing! And envying him thus I became the more confused.
“It is a kinsman of mine,” he said, in some perplexity— “Mr. Lawrence Clavering, and a devoted servant of your Majesty.”
“A kinsman of yours,” said the King, affably. “That makes him doubly welcome.”
And then the most ridiculous thing occurred, though I perceived nothing of its humour at the time. For of a sudden the King gave a start.
“He is wounded, my lord,” he cries. “He shall have my surgeon to attend to him. Tell Edgar; he is below. Bid him hurry!” and he came a little nearer towards me, as though with his own hands he would help me to rise. “You were hurt on your journey hither. How long — how long must blood be the price of loyalty to me and mine?”
The poignant sadness of his voice redoubled my confusion.
“Quick!” cried the King. “The poor lad will swoon.” And, indeed, I was very near to swooning, but it was from sheer humiliation. I glanced about me, wishing the floor would open. But it was the door that opened, and Lord Bolingbroke opened it. I jumped to my feet to stop him.
“Your Majesty,” I exclaimed, “it is no wound I would to my soul that it were!”
“No wound!” said the King, drawing back and bending his brows at me in a frown.
“What is it, then, Lawrence?” asked Bolingbroke as he closed the door.
I looked down at my white buckskin breeches, with the red patches spreading over them.
“It is,” said I, “a jugful of claret.”
No one spoke for a little, and I noticed the King’s face grew yet sterner and more cold. He was, in fact, like so many men of a reserved disposition, very sensitive to the least hint of ridicule upon all occasions, and particularly so when he had been betrayed into the expression of any feeling.
“Your Majesty,” I faltered out ruefully, “the Rector of the Jesuit College in Paris warned me before I set out, of the dangers which spring from overmuch zeal, and this is the second proof of his wisdom that I have had to-day. For now I have offended your Majesty by stumbling impertinently into your presence; and before, the maid boxed my ears in the passage for upsetting her claret.”
The speech was lucky enough to win my pardon. For Bolingbroke began to laugh, and in a moment or two the King’s face relaxed, and he joined in with him.
“But we have yet to know,” said he, “the reason of your haste.”
I explained how that, having come into an inheritance, I had ridden off to Bar-le-Duc, to put it at his disposal, and from Bar-le-Duc to Commercy; and how, on the sight of Lord Bolingbroke’s carriage in the courtyard, I had rushed into his presence, without a thought that he might be closeted with the King. I noticed that at the mention of Blackladies the King and Bolingbroke exchanged a glance. But neither interrupted me in my explanation.
“You give me, at all events, a proof of your devotion to your kinsman,” said the King; “and I am fain to take that as a guarantee that you are no less devoted to myself.”
“Nay,” interposed Lord Bolingbroke; “your Majesty credits me with what belongs to yourself. For I doubt if Lawrence would have shown such eagerness for my company had he found me in the Dauphiné instead of in Lorraine.”
The King nodded abstractedly, and sat him down at the table, which was littered over with papers, and finally seized upon a couple of letters, which he read through, comparing them one with the other.
“You can give me, then, information concerning Cumberland,” he said, changing to a tone sharp and precise; and he proceeded to put to me a question or two concerning the numbers of his adherents and the strength of their adhesion.
“Your Majesty,” I replied, “my news is all hearsay. For this inheritance has come to me unexpected and unsought The last year I have lived in Paris.”
He drummed with his fingers upon the table, like one disappointed.
“You know nothing, then, of the county?”
“I have never so much as set foot in it. I was born in Shropshire.”
“Then, your Majesty,” Lord Bolingbroke interrupted, “neither is he known there. There is an advantage in that which counterbalances his lack of information.”
The King raised his eyes to my face, and looked at me doubtfully, with a pinching of the lips.
“He is young for the business,” he said, “and one may perhaps think” — he smiled as he added the word— “precipitate.”
My hopes, which had risen with a bound at the hint that some special service might be required of me, sank like a pebble in a pool. I cudgelled my brains for some excuse, my recollections for some achievement, however slight, which might outweigh my indiscretion. But I had not a single deed to my name: and what excuse could acquit me of a hot-headed thoughtlessness? I remained perforce silent and abashed; and it was in every way fortunate that I did, for my Lord Bolingbroke tactfully put forward the one argument that could serve my turn. Said he quite simply —
“His grandfather fell at Naseby, his father in the siege of Deny, and with those two lives, twice were the fortunes of the family lost.”
The King rose from his table and came over to me. He laid a hand upon my shoulder.
“And so your father died for mine,” he said, and there was something new, something more personal in the kindliness of his accent, as though my father’s death raised me from a unit in the aggregate of his servants into the station of a friend; “and your grandfather for my grandfather.”
“Your Majesty sees that it is a privilege which I inherit,” I replied. From the tail of my eye I saw my kinsman smiling appreciation of the reply.
“Lawrence has the makings of a courtier, your Majesty,” said he, with a laugh.
“Nay,” I interrupted hotly, “this is honest truth. Let the King prove me!”
It was the King who laughed now, and he patted my shoulder with a quite paternal air, though, in truth, he was not so many years older than myself.
“Well,” he said, “why not? He is a hawk of the right nest. Why not?” and he turned him again to Bolingbroke. “As you say, he is not known in Cumberland, and there is, besides, a very natural reason for his presence in the county.” He stood looking me over for a second, and then went back abruptly to his papers on the table. “But I would you could give me reliable news as to those parts.”
“News I can give your Majesty,” I answered, “though whether it is reliable or not I cannot take it upon oath to say. But the man who passed it to me was the steward of Blackladies, and he spoke in that spirit wherein I would have all men speak.” And I told him all that Ashlock had recounted to me.
“Oh,” said the King, when I had ended, and he made the suggestion eagerly to Bolingbroke. “Perhaps it were best, then, that I should land upon the coast of Cumberland in England. What say you?”
I saw Bolingbroke’s eyebrows lift ever so slightly.
“I thought,” he answered, with the merest touch of irony in his tone, “that your Majesty had determined some half an hour since to land at Montrose?”
“I know,” said the King, with something of petulance; “but these later advices may prove our best guide.”
“But are they true?” said Bolingbroke, spreading out his hands.
“They tally with the report of Mr. Rookley,” said the King.
I started at the mention of the name, and the King remarked the movement. He looked towards me, then again at the letter in his han
d, which was written in a round and clumsy character. I caught sight of a word in that letter, and I remembered it afterwards, because it chanced to be misspelt.
“Oh,” said he, “Mr. Jervas Rookley signs himself of Blackladies? I fancied that the name was familiar to me, when first you uttered it.”
I repeated all that Ashlock had related to me concerning the man, and how I was to hold his estate in trust for him until the King came to his throne.
“We will see to it,” said he, “that Mr. Clavering shall not be the loser.”
I felt the blood rush into my face.
“It was with no thought of that kind that I spoke,” I declared earnestly. “I pray your Majesty to believe me.”
But Lord Bolingbroke broke in upon my protestations.
“This steward is with you at Commercy? Then, if it please your Majesty, I would advise that we see the man here, and question him closely face to face. For Mr. Jervas Rookley — —” And he filled the gap of words with a shrug of significance.
“You distrust him?” asked the King; “yet it appears his loyalty has cost him an estate.”
“It is that perplexes me; for I know these country gentlemen,” and his voice sharpened to the bitterest sneer. “At night, over their cups, they are all for King James; then they consult their pillows, and in the sober morning they are all for King George. Oh, I know them! A sore head makes a world of difference in their politics.”
The words seemed to me hot and quick, with all the memories of his defeated labours during those last six years of Queen Anne’s reign, and I fancied the King himself was inclined to discount their value on that account.
“Yet,” he urged, “these letters speak in no uncertain terms.”
“They speak only of a disposition towards your Majesty,” rejoined his minister. “It is a very tender, delicate, and unsatisfactory thing, a disposition. What we would have is their resolve. Are they resolved to drive on with vigour, if matters tend to a revolution? Will they support the revolution with advantage, if it spins out to a war? It is on these points your Majesty needs to be informed; and it is on these points they keep so discreet a silence. We ask them for their plan, as Marshall Berwick asked them time out of mind, and we get the same answer that he received. How many troops will his most Christian Majesty land? How many stands of arms? how many thousand crowns? Not one word of a definite design; not one word of a precise statement of their resources.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 217