He walked about the room as he spoke, with every mark of discouragement in his gestures and expression, while the King listened to him in an uneasy impatience, as though he was rather irritated than impressed by Bolingbroke’s doubts.
“Very well,” said the King, tapping his foot on the floor, “we will examine Mr. Clavering’s steward;” and he bade me go and fetch Ashlock into the room. But search as I might, nowhere could I find a trace of him. He had stayed no more than five minutes in the house, the people of the inn informed me. I hurried to the stables, thinking perchance to find him there. I questioned the ostlers, the drawers, even the wench who had boxed my ears. No one had knowledge of his whereabouts, and since it would be an idle business to go hunting for him through the unfamiliar streets of Commercy, I left a sharp word that he should come up the moment he returned, and so got me back chapfallen to Lord Bolingbroke’s apartment.
The King’s secretary, Mr. Edgar, was now in the room, gathering together the papers which overspread the table.
“It is no great matter,” said the King, when I explained how that I had failed in my search, “for I doubt me that I could have heard him out. Besides, Mr. Clavering, I have had some talk concerning you with your kinsman here, and since your inheritance and your journey hither fit so aptly with our needs, it were a pity to miss the occasion.”
“Your Majesty,” I cried, and I felt my heart swell and leap within me, and my head spin with exultation. Here was the very thing of which I had dreamed hopelessly so often during those weary months at Paris, letting my fancies dally with it as with some bright and charming fairy tale, and, lo! it had come true. It had come true! The words made a silent music at my heart, and animated all my blood. It had come true! and then, of a sudden, there shot through me, chilling me to the centre, the rector’s warning, and the forebodings that had flowed from it. Did this mission, which the King assigned to me, harbinger the hour of trial? Should I fail when it came? I set my teeth and clenched the nails into the palms of my hands. My whole body cried No! No! but underneath I seemed to hear a voice, very low, very persistent, speaking with full knowledge, and it said Yes! Yes!
“Then this will be your charge,” continued the King, recalling me to myself. “You will journey with all speed to London, and bear with you a letter in my hand to the Duke of Ormond, at Richmond,” and he paused upon the words. “It must pass from your hand into the Duke’s. You will then go north to your estate, and collect knowledge for our use as to what help we may expect from Cumberland, and, so far as you can gather, from the counties adjoining. Lord Bolingbroke will inform you more of the particulars. Your errand, of course, you will keep secret — locked up from all — from our supporters, no less than from our opponents. It would be of detriment to us if they came to think that we distrusted them. Nor do we — it is their judgment, not their loyalty, about which we wish to be assured. We think, therefore, that it would be prudent in you to make no parade of your convictions. Hear both sides like one that holds the balance evenly. For, if you take one side openly, you will hear from our friends just what we hear so far away as Bar-le-Duc; and so God speed you!” and he held out his hand to me, and I kissed it. Then Mr. Edgar opened the door, and the King walked to it. He was already across the threshold, when he stopped and turned back, pulling a silver medal from his fob.
“This,” said he, “is the fac-simile of that medal which the Duchess of Gordon presented to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, seven years back,” and he gave it into my hand. “It may serve to keep me in your heart and memories. Moreover, a day may come when it will be necessary for you to convince our friends in the North, on whose side you stand; and this will help you to the end. For there is no other copy.”
I knelt down and kissed the medal reverently. On the one side was struck the head of King James — very true and life-like — with the words “cujus est;” on the other a picture of the British Islands, with this motto inscribed beneath it, “Reddite.”
“It is a text,” I said, and indistinctly enough, for that simple word “Reddite,” so charged was it with a sad and pitiful significance, brought the tears welling to my throat “It is a text I would have every man in England preach from.”
“You will act on it,” said the King; and I flattered myself with the thought that I noted something of a veritable tenderness in his accent “You will act on it; that is better;” and so he went out of the room.
Lord Bolingbroke closed the door, flung himself into a chair, and yawned prodigiously.
“Lawrence,” he said, “I am very thirsty.”
A bottle of Rhenish wine was standing on a sideboard at one end of the room. He went over and opened it, and filled two glasses.
“Let us drink,” said he, and handed one to me “Let us drink to ourselves,” and he raised the glass to his lips.
“Nay,” I cried, “to the King first”
“Very well, to the King first, if you will, and to ourselves next. What matters the toast, so long as we drink it?” and he drained his glass to the bottom. I followed his example.
“Now to ourselves,” said he; and he filled them again. “It is a good fashion,” he continued, in a musing tone, “that of drinking to the King. For so one drinks double, and never a word can be said against it.” I noticed, however, that he drank triple and quadruple before he had come to an end. Then he looked at my breeches and laughed.
“And so the wench boxed your ears,” he said, and, becoming quite serious, he took me by the arm. “Lawrence, let’s drink to her!”
“I should reel in my saddle if I did,” said I, drawing back.
“Then don’t sit in it!” he replied. “Let’s drink to her several times, and then we’ll go to bed.”
“I trust to go to bed a good twenty miles from Commercy.”
He shook his head at me.
“Lawrence, it is plain that you are new to the service of kings.”
“You have a letter for me,” said I.
“To the Duke of Ormond,” and he looked at me in surprise. “You mean to start to-night?”
“Yes.”
“Very well,” and he sat himself down to the table, transformed in a second to a cool man of business. “The letter is in the chevalier’s hand” — he drew it from his pocket as he spoke— “and there are many ships in the Channel. You had best charter a boat at Dunkirk, the smaller the better, and set sail at night-fall, so that you may strike the Downs before sunrise.” Thereupon he proceeded to instruct me as to the precise details concerning which I was to inform myself in Cumberland — such as the number of troops they could put into the field, and how competent they were to face well-drilled and disciplined squadrons, their weapons, the least assistance from France they would hazard the rising upon, and such-like matters. Then he rose and prepared to accompany me downstairs. I was still holding the medal in my hand, and now and again fingering it, as a man will what he holds most precious. “And, Lawrence,” he said, “I would hide the medal, even from yourself, if that be possible. You may find it a very dangerous gift before you have done.”
He spoke with so solemn a warning as even then did something to sober my enthusiasm.
“It was a wise word that the Chevalier spoke when he bade you beware how you sided openly with the Jacks.”
“Oh!” said I, as the thought struck me. “It was you, then, that prompted that advice — and for my sake.”
“Not altogether.”
“But in the main, for my sake.”
“Lawrence,” said he, leaning across the table, with his eyes fixed upon my face and his voice lowered to a whisper, “I misdoubt me, but this is a fool’s business we’re embarked upon. You heard the Chevalier. He has no fixed design,” and he brought his hand down upon the table with a dunch. “One day he will land at Montrose, the next in Devonshire, the next in Cumberland, and, God knows, but the most likely place of all is the Tower steps.”
“No!” I cried. “I’ll not believe that. He has you to help him
now.”
Bolingbroke smiled, but shook his head.
“He has six other ministers besides myself, with Fanny Oglethorpe and Olive Trant at the head, and all of them have more power than I. He will concert a plan with me, and the hour after give a contrary order behind my back. It was the same when Berwick had the disposing of his affairs. No, Lawrence, I would have you be prudent, very prudent.”
He came down the stairs with me and stood in the courtyard repeating ever the same advice, the while I mounted my horse. Of my steward I still could see no sign, and, leaving another direction that he should follow with all speed, I rode off towards the village of Isoncour, where Ashlock caught me up some two hours after I came there. I rated him pretty soundly, being much contraried by the melancholy forebodings of Lord Bolingbroke.
Ashlock made his excuses, however, very submissively, saying that he had dined at an ordinary in the town, and thereafter, being much fatigued with the hurry of our travelling, had fallen fast asleep. And I, bethinking me that, in spite of his gloomy forecast, Lord Bolingbroke would none the less serve the King with unremitting vigour, began to take heart again, and so pardoned Leonard Ashlock.
We came then to Dunkirk in the space of four days, and I was much put to it how I should get safely over into England with the King’s letter. For the English warships were ever on the watch for the King’s emissaries, and one of them, a sloop, was riding not so far out in full view of Dunkirk. In this difficulty Ashlock was of the greatest service to me, discovering qualities which I should never have suspicioned in him. For, espying a little pinnace drawn up on the beach, he said:
“The two of us could sail that across, sir.”
“No doubt,” said I, “if one of us could steer a course and the other handle the sails.”
“I can do the first, sir, by myself, and the second with your help,” he replied.
I went down the sands to the boat, and discovering to whom it belonged from a bystander, sought the owner out and forthwith bought it at his own price. For thus we need confide our business to no one, but waiting quietly till nightfall, we might slip past the big ship under cover of the dark. And this we did, launching the boat and bending the sails by the light of a lantern, which we kept as nearly as we could ever turned towards the land. The moon was in its fourth quarter and not yet risen when we started, so that the night, though not so black as we could wish, was still dark enough for our purpose. We had besides the lights from the port-holes of the warship to guide us, which gleamed pure and bright across the water like a triple row of candles upon an altar. We ran cautiously, therefore, for some distance to the west close under the shadow of the coast, and then fetching a wide compass about the ship, set our course straight for England. It was a light boat we were in, rigged with a lug-sail and a jib, and we slipped along under a fine reaching wind that heeled us over till the thwart was but an inch from the froth of the water.
“If only the wind hold!” said Ashlock, with a glance at the sail, and there was a lively ring of exultation in his voice. And, indeed, it was an inspiriting business this flight of ours across the Channel, or at all events this part of it I lay forward in the bows with a great coat atop of me, and my face upturned to the spacious skies, which were strewn with a gold-dust of stars and jewelled with the planets. The wind blew out of the night sharp and clean, the waves bubbled and tinkled against the planks as the prow split them into a white fire, and we sped across that broad floor of the sea as if licensed to an illimitable course. Now and again the lights of a ship would rise to the right or left, glimmer for a little like an ocean will-o’-the-wisp and vanish; now and again we would drive past a little fleet of fishing-smacks lying to for the night with never so much as a candle alight amongst them all, and only the stars, as it were, entangled amongst their bare poles and rigging; and, after a little, the moon rose.
I thought of my crib in the Rue St Antoine and the months of confinement there as of something intolerable. The wide freedom of the sea became an image of the life I was entering upon. I felt the brine like a leaven in my blood. And then of a sudden the sail flapped above me like the wing of a great bat, the strenuous motion of the pinnace ceased, and we were floating idly upon an even keel.
I looked towards Ashlock; he sat motionless in the stern with the tiller in his hand and the moonlight white upon his face. Then he took a turn about the tiller with a rope, glanced along the boat with his body bent as though he was looking forward beneath the sail, and came lightly stepping across the benches towards the bows. I lay still and watched him in a lazy contentment. Midway betwixt bow and stern he stopped and busied himself with tightening a stay; then again he crouched down and looked forwards, but this time it seemed to me that he was not looking out beyond the bowsprit, but rather into the bows to the spot where I lay huddled under my coat in the shadow of the thwart I could see his face quite plainly, and it appeared to me to have changed, in some way to have narrowed. It may have been a fancy, it may have been the moonlight upon his face, but his eyes seemed to glisten at me from out a countenance suddenly made trivial by cunning.
After a second he crept forward again, and I noticed how lightly — how very lightly he stepped. Would he stop at the mast, I asked myself? Was his business the tightening of a sheet even as he had tightened the stay? He stooped beneath the sail and still crept forward, running his hand along the top of the gunwale as he came; and it broke upon me as something new that he and I were alone in mid-channel, cabined within the planks of a little boat, he the servant, — but whose servant? — I not so much the master as the master’s substitute and tripper-up.
I felt for my sword, but I remembered that I had loosed it from my belt when we had put to sea. From the spot where I lay I could see the scabbard shining by the tiller. At all events, Ashlock had not brought it with him. I watched him without a movement as he approached, but underneath the coat, every nerve and muscle in my body was braced to the tightness of a cord.
He bent over me, holding his breath, it seemed; his hands came forward hovering above my chest, but they held no weapon; his face sank out of the moonlight, dropped beneath the gunwale lower and lower down upon mine. Meanwhile I watched him, looking straight into his eyes. His face was but a few inches from mine when he drew back with a little quivering cry — it was, indeed, more of a startled in-drawing of the breath than a cry — and crouched on his hams by my side. Still I did not move, and again his face came forward over mine, very slowly, very cautiously, and down to where I lay in the dark, with my eyes open watching his. I could endure the suspense no longer.
“What is it, Ashlock?” I asked quietly, and in asking the question that moment, made a very great mistake, the importance whereof I did not discover until long afterwards.
Ashlock sprang back as though I had struck him in the face, I raised myself on one elbow and thrust the other outside the covering.
“I could not tell, sir, whether you waked or slept,” he said; and I thought his voice trembled a little.
“I was awake, Ashlock. What is it?”
“The wind has shifted, sir,” and now he answered confidently enough, “and blows dead in our teeth. We must needs tack if we are to reach the coast by daybreak.”
“Well?”
“I cannot do it, sir, without your help. It needs two to tack if you sail with a lug-sail.”
And that I found to be true. For the sail being what is called a square-sail with a gaff along the top of it, each time the pinnace went about it was necessary to lower it, and hoist it again on the other side of the mast. The which it fell to me to do, while Ashlock guided the tiller. So that I knew there was good reason for his waking me. However, I had little time for speculation upon the matter one way or another, since we sailed into a mist shortly afterwards, and were on the stretch, both eyes and ears, lest we should be run down by some vessel, or ever we could see it.
I was much exercised, too, what with the stars being hid, and our constant going about, whether Ashlock wo
uld be able to keep the boat in a course towards England. I need not, however, have troubled my head upon that score, for it was as though he had some sixth sense which found its occasion upon the sea, and when the day broke and the mist rolled down and massed itself upon the water, we were within five miles of the white cliffs with Dover Castle upon our starboard bow. The mist, I should say, was at that time about chin high, for standing up in the boat we looked across a grey driving floor, above which the smaller vessels only showed their masts.
“Shall I run her into the harbour?” asked Ashlock, and he turned the boat’s head towards land.
“No!” I cried vehemently. For now that we were come within sight of England the letter that I carried began to burn in my pocket, and I felt the surest conviction that if we disembarked at Dover, we should be surrounded, catechised, and finally searched, upon the ground of a tell-tale face, which face would assuredly be mine. “No!” I said; “let us take advantage of the mist, and creep along the coast till we find some inlet where we can beach the boat.”
This we did, and running now with a freer sail, we came in little more than an hour to a cove some four or five miles to the north-east of Dover, the cliffs breaking off very sharp at each side with a line of thin rocks jutting out at the south corner, and the walls of the cove steep all round and thickly wooded as low as we could see. Towards this cove we pointed, intending to run in there and abandon the boat But when we were within half a mile of land the sun blazed out in the sky and the fog shredded like so much gauze burnt up in a fire. It was a fortunate thing for us that we had come no nearer to the shore. For there, low down on the beach, and but a yard or two from the water’s edge, on a tiny strip of level ground, were four little cottages with the British ensign afloat. Ashlock rapped out an oath and thrust the tiller across to its further limit, meaning to go about and run back out of sight of the cove.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 218