Chapter V: Part 5

Five-and-twenty minutes to nine. No sounds of horses yet. The landlord might listen intensely, but the hope usurped the place of the deed; the soldiers did not come. He had forgotten to tell Cicely to prepare the King’s supper. Bah! he would want no supper. There was only twenty-five minutes, though. If those thrice-cursed soldiers did not come soon, he would be calling for it. Yea, and half an hour afterwards they would be too late. Diggory Fargus and his men were due at half-past nine. And when my Lord Farnham and his lady left his doors, the King would also go.

In the mood of that particular moment these thoughts were bitter. A moment before and a moment afterwards the landlord had half a hope that his message might miscarry, and that the soldiers would not come at all. It would be the loss of a fortune, it was true. But so extreme was the nausea of his weakness, that he felt unable to bear the brunt of all that must ensue.

The cries, the struggles, the prayers, the recriminations, the despair, and possibly the blood, would they not be more than his manhood could endure! But at this instant he was fearful lest the delay should be the means of two prizes of great worth slipping out of his fingers. The King would escape, and the cavalier and his wife would go unchallenged. A fortune would be lost to him, and all because in the first place he had wavered. Had he but been the man that all his life he had thought himself, Joseph would never have been recalled, and the business would have been over an hour ago.

Ten minutes to nine. Would the soldiers never come! The landlord was resigning himself to his despair. He must tell Cicely to prepare the King’s supper. Never was a weak man so well punished for his dalliance. They would not be here in time; the King would escape.

As the chances of that contingency increased, and it looked more and more probable that the landlord would not after all have to pass through the most terrible ordeal of his life, greed, his ruling passion, reasserted itself. He became the prey of the bitterest disappointment.

At five minutes to nine he was lamenting the loss of a fortune. Alas, they would be too late! He sat down in his fireside chair with a heavy sense of personal misfortune. He had sweated blood over this bitter business; and yet nothing had come of it. He had frightened the life out of himself; he had stripped his craven heart naked before the fierce eyes of his understanding; there were no longer unsuspected secrets existing between his brain and his spirit; and there was not to be a penny-piece to compensate him. He had lost a fortune. He had not taken the tide at the flood. The hesitation of his weakness had been fatal.

Three minutes to nine. There came sounds in the night suddenly. The landlord sprang up from his chair, and ran to the keyhole of the kitchen door. Horses!

Oh, God! they were coming, after all. His first thought was, not that they were coming in time to earn a fortune for him, but that they were actually coming, after all; and that the moment of his agony was at hand. The wretched man clapped his hands to his ears; he could not bear to hear the sounds of their arrival. He fell half fainting into his chair. He covered his eyes; he buried his head in the cushions; his lips moved in a wild, inarticulate prayer. But he could not efface the things that were happening. The horsemen were pulling up under the sign.

CHAPTER
XIV

_The Divinity that
doth hedge a King_]

“Our landlord was right,” said the King.

Only too well could the people upstairs hear the sounds from the night that were frightening the landlord out of his wits.

“Mother of Jesu, be our guide!” cried the poor lady. A crucifix was in her hand. “Sire, whither canst thou flee?”

“It is too late for that, I fear, my dearest lady,” said the King. “What we have anticipated for so many days hath come to pass.”

“No, Sire!” said the woman, wildly. “At all costs, you must get away. Flee, Sire; flee anywhere! They must not, they shall not find you here!”

“They are already arrived,” said the King, still in the complete possession of his composure. “They have ridden very fast; they are dismounting beneath the window even now. Do you not hear their harsh, loud voices? One can even catch the words they utter.”

All listened with wildly-beating hearts.

“See! that is the chamber,” they heard the loudest voice of all exclaim, “with the light coming through the shutters. Now, do you watch back and front; spread out all round the house. D’ye hear me? Do you watch that window; ay, and do you watch the roof, too.”

The speaker was plainly the leader, and just as plainly was labouring under a great excitement. The King smiled his charming, melancholy smile.

“I would have you dry your tears, dear lady,” he said. “I think we can all suffer this event with fortitude. It is hardly so terrible as it seems.”

“Sire,” cried the woman, “you must not, you shall not be ta’en!”

“One man, and another one disabled and bedridden, cannot avail against a multitude,” said the King. “Besides, violence should never be resorted to in a lady’s presence, madam.”

The woman gazed distraught this way and that about the chamber. Again and yet again she cried out that the King should not be taken. The King laughed.

“There are but two places in which to hide, as I can see,” said he; “and I do not think either of them would afford us much protection. One is up the chimney; the other, under the bed.”

Already the clank of arms filled the kitchen below. Boots and spurs rang on the stairs. They were coming up.

“They shall not enter!” cried the woman, with an almost childish impotence.

She ran to the door and turned the key in the lock. The King rose from his chair, still laughing. The act of the unhappy lady was that of a child. What could a frail piece of wood avail against a company of armed men? The door was tried and shaken.

“Open!” said a stern, excited voice.

“Oh, my King, my King!” the woman cried in her despair. “They must not, they shall not take you!”

She set her back against the door. The next instant the first shivering blow fell upon it from without. The lock started; the hinges groaned. A second blow and the door was open, and the woman was driven hard against the bed. But as the foremost man entered the chamber she turned upon him, and made as if to thrust him back. Neither he nor those behind him heeded her, however. They pressed inexorably forward into the room.

The King stood awaiting them with an absolute indifference, as though he were hardly conscious of their presence, let alone their errand. He did not speak and he did not move. Indeed, so unconcerned did he appear, that his features seemed to relapse into those of Will Jackson. They grew utterly blank and destitute of emotion; and this, in unison with his dirty, stained countenance and mean dress and appearance, caused the first of the soldiers to enter the room, Captain Culpeper, hardly to regard him at all.

He turned to the man in the bed. The face of Lord Farnham, worn with illness as it was, and racked with pain, betrayed the strong excitement under which he was labouring. His dress and the manner in which he lay were far more calculated to attract attention to him than the King, whose garb and impassivity were wonderful foils to his true condition.

For a moment Captain Culpeper, who apparently was not at all familiar with the King’s appearance, looked at Lord Farnham a little doubtfully, and in that moment Lady Farnham’s strange resolve was born.

As a cat notes the movements of a mouse, had the unhappy lady noted those of the King’s enemies. Of so vastly different a nature was she to the helpless landlord downstairs in the kitchen, that in lieu of his paralysis at the approach of the terrible crisis she had a preternatural keenness in all her faculties. Her mind was perfectly clear, whatever the stress under which it was labouring. Her wits were roused to a desperate acuteness. Her whole being was possessed and dominated by one awful thought. The King’s life was at stake; the King’s life must be saved.

The soldiers did not move an inch but what the lady saw them. An instant of indecision and she was prepared to act upon it.

Captain Culpeper looked doubtfully a moment at Lord Farnham lying in the bed. The next, and the woman had flung herself passionately forward and buried her head beside him among his pillows.

“Oh, my King, my King!” she cried, putting her arms about her husband’s neck. “It were better you had died rather than this. It is indeed the end!”

The soldiers stood off respectfully. The grief of the woman was so piteous, that it pierced even their rude souls. Lady Farnham continued to weep convulsively upon her husband’s neck, calling him by the King’s name, and pouring forth the cries of her despair. Captain Culpeper, who had never seen Charles, and had only the vaguest ideas of what he was like, did not suspect that the real King stood, in a servant’s livery, behind him. The woman’s actions in those tragic circumstances were so in keeping with them, and to the unpractised eyes of the soldiers the man in the bed was the only person in the room who could in the least fulfil their ideas of what a monarch was like, that the deception, once it was set up, was not difficult to maintain.

Charles, with an alertness of mind that seldom forsook him, grasped the scheme as soon as the woman’s first words were uttered. He prepared to do his part when the chance arose. If he could only get through the throng of soldiers filling the room, the stairs, the kitchen below, and the inn entrance, without exciting a breath of suspicion, all was not yet lost. As he stood hemmed in at present, the feat appeared impossible. But fortune had already taken a strange turn: he was as yet unrecognised; he must maintain the demeanour of the carefully trained, impassive servitor. Therefore, while the lady bewailed his fate and clasped her husband in her arms, and the abashed soldiers stood off a little to permit her to do so, he neither spoke a word nor moved a limb, but kept well behind the Captain with respectful solicitude of bearing.

Lord Farnham, who was not so nimble of wit as his wife and Charles, was at first quite bewildered by the woman’s behaviour. Then, in a flash it came into his heart that it was to save the King. She was prepared to sacrifice the lives of them both that that of the monarch might be spared. The thought was no sooner in his mind than it changed his blood into fire. As the arms of his wife clung closer about his neck, he grew possessed with only one aspect of what was required of him. She was calling on him to save the life of the King at the cost of his own.

He was called on to give his own life for that of the one man in the world he feared and hated most. In that first brief instant of time, Charles Stuart was not the King to him, but the man who had dared to come so boldly between him and the woman he adored. It was asking too much of flesh and blood.

Lord Farnham’s hatred of the King was so fierce, so active, so intense, that in despite of his wife’s example, he strove to open his lips to denounce him--to denounce him who had set poison into his soul simply to while away an idle moment. But even as he was wrenched in the grip of his desperate jealousy, he saw the King’s face.

It was regarding him with the same stoical calm as when he had raised his pistol an hour or two before to fire upon it. The same look of slightly amused indifference he thought he saw lurking in the eyes, and creeping round the lips. The King had looked into his heart, and, shrugging his shoulders at the drunken demon he encountered there, had bidden him to do his worst.

Again the King’s face had been too much for his mad purposes. Before his lips could form the words of betrayal, the resolve died stillborn in his heart. With the King gazing upon him, it was useless to attempt to utter them. He must lie there passively, and acquiesce in the deceit that had for its object the sparing of the King’s life and the sacrifice of his own.

Nay, he must do more than acquiesce in it. He must assist it; he must promote it by every means in his power. For was not this hateful man his King? Was he not the representative of all that three generations of his family had recklessly spent their possessions and their blood upon? Was he not the symbol--he, the dirty-faced man in the mean clothes--upon which the gold, the tears, and the very lives of hundreds of the noblest and proudest in the land had been lavished? And yet he, a mere youth, was prepared to forego the first duty taught him by his father, the father who had yielded up his life that he might teach it with the better authority, that of fidelity to the King, simply because his Majesty, overcome by the beauty of his wife, had gloried in the fact.

He was perfectly sane now. The fever of his insanity had lasted less than a minute. The man was his King; and where his sacred Majesty was concerned, no man had a right to think of himself. As suddenly as he had given way to his furious hate, he now became intoxicated by the King’s divinity. As long as a breath remained faithful to his body, so must he remain faithful to his sovereign. He must thank his God upon his knees, humbly, that it was given to him to render even the smallest service to his King.

He must aid his wife in her strange, mad, heroic efforts. The spirit to conceive, to act, and to accomplish thrilled through his weak frame. His lips grew articulate; his voice took a new tone, one wholly strange to himself and even to those who were familiar with it.

“Madam,” he said, “be calm, I pray you. We must bow to the inevitable.”

Very gently he unclasped the arms of his wife from about his neck. He then turned to the eagerly-listening soldiers with a grave, sad smile, which yet had a delicate courtesy in it that insensibly disarmed them with its charm.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I pray you be a little patient with us. We are even now but recovering from a memorial we bore upon our person of the melancholy Third. Be a little patient, I pray you, gentlemen, and we will hope to rise from our couch when we have recovered of ourselves a little, and greet you more formally.”

Captain Culpeper bowed humbly. Few men can look upon a King unmoved; and a monarch in his last extremity may receive even the consideration of his enemies.

“I beg you, Sire,” said the soldier, in a broken voice, “that you will not submit your person to the least inconvenience. We find you so weak and stricken, Sire, that we earnestly pray that to-night you will not attempt to discompose yourself on our account.”

“You are more than kind, sir,” said the man in the bed; “a courteous enemy, indeed. But we will rise and endeavour to extend a little courtesy unto you and these gentlemen, as is your merit.”

The words were excellently spoken. They had a dignified grace, and, above all, by some strange trick that the occasion had invoked, the incomparable melancholy that might be expected to proceed from the lips of the unfortunate King. The illusion was perfect. There was no longer any need for the soldiers to look about in uncertainty for the King, now that the man in the bed had spoken. His tones were unmistakable.

Charles, however, was no nearer escape than he was before. He was still hemmed in, in the middle of the chamber, by the press of soldiery. Some pretext must be found upon which he would be allowed to go thence. But the least excitement of their suspicions must be avoided, or he would be inevitably detained. And every moment that he loitered now was fraught with the highest danger. Their great fear was the landlord. They had reason to think him faithful, but not too liberally endowed with wit. Should he appear in the chamber entirely ignorant of the deceit that was being practised, he was quite likely to commit some gross blunder by which the King would be discovered. And, too, there was always the fear that some soldier, better informed than his companions, might recognise the King in spite of his disguise and the trick his friends were practising for his benefit.

Some means of exit must be provided for him at once, lest one of these untoward things should happen. It was again the woman’s indomitable wit that provided the stratagem. She rose from the couch as if endeavouring to be calm at the express command of the King. The efforts she made to control her emotion were visible to all.

“Sire,” she said to the man in the bed, “although you have signified your intention of rising from your couch of sickness, I fear your Majesty will not be able to do so until you have drunk of that cordial the apothecary of Charmouth gave you. It is in your Majesty’s saddlebag, is it not, hanging in the stable?”

Lord Farnham saw at once the significance of this. He had the wit to grasp in which direction the ruse was leading.

“It is well thought on, madam,” he said. “And, indeed, now you speak of it, I shall be hard put to, to rise without it. It were well if you sent Jackson to procure it for us.”

The servitor still stood calm and impassive.

“Jackson,” said Lady Farnham, “you remember where we left his Majesty’s cordial. It is lying in one of the saddlebags in the stable.”

Jackson bowed gravely in assent, without uttering a word, the model of a well-trained serving-man.

“Sir,” said the lady, addressing Captain Culpeper, “will you allow this man to get the cordial for the King? I am afraid his Majesty will find it very needful.”

“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the soldier, eagerly. “Sergeant, tell them to make way there for the King’s servitor. Also those on the stairs; and do you see that they do so.”

“I thank you, sir,” said the man in the bed, with his courteous smile.

CHAPTER
XV

“_Way there for the
King’s servitor_”]

The King obediently began to move with stolid precision towards the chamber door. First one soldier stood back to let him pass; and then another; and then another. He walked through the door of the crowded chamber. With the same grave, steady, mechanical gait he reached the stairs.

“Way there,” said the officious Sergeant, behind him, “for the King’s servitor!”

With keen looks of curiosity, the men besieging the rickety old stairs found a passage for him somehow, through which he contrived to squeeze the royal person. His clothes and his body pressed against their pistols and their breast-pieces; their breaths saluted his face; but step by step he came down into the kitchen.

“Way there for the King’s servitor!” said the Sergeant again.

The kitchen was hardly so thronged as the stairs. There was one man in it, however, who might undo all. From his chair in the chimney corner peered the landlord’s astonished face.

“Way there for the King’s servitor!”

The landlord was huddled in his chair, as pale as death. His face was drawn and hideous; his eyes were half closed, and the eyeballs had shrunk to such a degree that they seemed to be buried in his head. But when the King came down the stairs, and the great voice of the Sergeant heralded his approach, Gamaliel wrenched his eyes open and sat up in his chair. He was startled and unstrung. The whole thing was too vivid for a dream, and yet it was impossible. These soldiers had come expressly to fetch the King; and here was the King walking unmolested out of their hands.

It was surely the King. There was his long, shambling form, his loose limbs, his breeches and jerkin of leather, his impassive countenance. Yes, it was the King looking at him, the landlord. Sure, there was a half-amused gleam come upon the King’s face suddenly; and, see, he had set a finger to his lips. He was demanding silence of him.

The old man knew, as he sat in his chair, that the King was escaping, and that his own fortune was slipping away. He was perfectly conscious of these two overmastering facts; he sat in the full possession of his faculties. He had only to speak the word and the prize he had sweated blood to secure was his. The word must be spoken.

“Way there for the King’s servitor!”

The King, ever with his slow, regulated, mechanical tread, was passing through the men standing inside and outside the kitchen door.

The landlord opened his swollen lips, but his tongue had not the power to move. The veins rose in his forehead into great distended knots; he struggled frantically. The moment of a lifetime was passing; the King was escaping, and Gamaliel Hooker knew it. One word--oh, God! only just one little word, and the King would not go!

The man’s breath croaked and sobbed in his throat convulsively; but nothing human was heard from his lips. The King had passed out of the door; the officious Sergeant had escorted him through the last of his men, and, having done so, was returning with his head in the air, in a truly martial and self-satisfied manner. The landlord turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; his fingers clutched the air; the veins in his forehead continued to rise, until it seemed that they must break through the bloodless skin of his forehead; his voice came at last in an indistinct croak.

The landlord’s extraordinary appearance drew the attention of the Sergeant.

“Why, man,” he said, “what ails thee?”

The landlord made a gurgle at the back of his throat.

“Speak! what is it?” said the Sergeant.

“The King,” said the landlord, forming a word at last.

“Yes, the King; what of him?” said the Sergeant. “He is lying on his bed upstairs.”

“No, no, no!” said the landlord. “No, no, no!”

“Why, fool, what is the matter?” said the Sergeant, losing his patience.

“The King is----!”

The landlord fell back in his chair unconscious.

CHAPTER
XVI

_The departing
Guests_]

The Sergeant unloosed the landlord’s coat and ordered one of his men to procure water and dash it in his face. But Gamaliel had gone too far to be brought round easily, and the time spent in restoring him to his senses was the King’s deliverance.

Presently the landlord opened his eyes and looked about him. The reaction brought with it a full measure of consciousness, and with it a command of his faculties. He could think; and, now it was too late, the power of speech was again vouchsafed to him.

“The King went out at that door!” he cried. “The King is escaped! That was the King you conducted to the door.”

“What do you mean?” demanded the astonished Sergeant. “Speak, clown and fool that you are! I tell you the King is upstairs.”

The landlord had now the power to unbosom his soul; and there was such a singular fervour of conviction in his words, that the soldier, vividly impressed by them, and bewildered by them too, made all haste up the stairs to Captain Culpeper, who, as he supposed, was still attending on the King.

The thoroughly alarmed and uneasy Sergeant came to him at the side of the bed, and recited the landlord’s story.

“What is this you say, Sergeant Williams?” said the Captain.

His heart sank with an overmastering foreboding that the landlord had spoken the truth. He had not known the King when he entered the chamber, never having set eyes upon his Majesty before; and none of his men knew him either--they had only hearsay to guide them. Could it be that he was the victim of a trick. He turned furiously upon the man in the bed and the woman beside him.

“My God!” he said, “you have duped me; you have deceived me. The King’s servitor was the King. You have been playing a part.”

The man and the woman looked at him defiantly. Every instant they could maintain their rôles was of the utmost advantage to the fugitive; and in any case their own lives were forfeit.

“What do you mean?” said young Lord Farnham, striving to enact the comedy to the bitter end.

“We have been tricked!” cried the Captain.

The truth had burst upon Captain Culpeper with stunning force. He saw it all. He became as one beside himself. He stamped, he raved, he swore. They had allowed the prize actually to slip away when their hands were upon it.

The King must be pursued. They must pursue him hot-foot. Up hill and down dale, over the rocks, into the very jaws of the sea they must hunt the royal fugitive. He had but ten minutes start of them, and he was on foot.

No, he was not on foot. It seemed that he had taken a horse from the stable and had ridden away. Those who saw him do so believed that he had the Captain’s permission, as he was said to be on some errand of his Majesty lying upstairs.

The Captain gnashed his teeth. He drove his men out of the room before him like a flock of sheep. There was not a precious instant to lose. They must get to horse. Dark as it was, they must scour every yard of the surrounding country. There never was such a noise and a rattle as, with that, these soldiers fled down the stairs and forth of the kitchen door.

“To horse, to horse; the King is escaped!” was the cry that rang out to the rocks by the side of the sea. Horses stamped under the signboard of the “Sea Rover”; boots, spurs, and stirrups struck one against the other; bridles shook; hoarse commands were given; the cavalcade moved fiercely and swiftly away.

Now that the crisis was past, the landlord was sufficiently master of himself to watch them go from his door. After this fiasco it was highly necessary, he argued, that he should do all he could to win their favour and their confidence. Captain Culpeper, despite the rage and excitement under which he was labouring, called out as he sprang to the saddle:

“Landlord, I charge you to detain the man and the woman upstairs against my return, on the peril of your life. I hold you already responsible for the King’s escape. Do you watch over these two persons, therefore, yet more jealously. I cannot spare any of my men to look after them, but you have your son and that strapping servant-girl. We will fetch them as soon as maybe, and lodge them in greater security.”

While the last of these words were being uttered, Captain Culpeper and his troops were riding away. Stunned by their import, the landlord went within and closed the door. It was as though he had heard the sentence of his own death, for he knew it was wholly out of his power to detain the man and the woman upstairs should Diggory Fargus only prove true to his appointment. The sailor had promised to come, in the company of three of his friends, at half-past nine, to bear away the lady and her stricken husband.

If they came, what an irony it was to suppose that he, his son Joseph, and Cicely, the serving-maid, could possibly prevail against the redoubtable mariner and three of his pirates or his smugglers!

As a preliminary measure, the landlord locked the door. Not only did he lock it, but he bolted it at the top and at the bottom, and ran the chain across. Then he looked at the clock. Ten minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus had promised to come at half-past nine. Probably he had purposely held off when he saw that the soldiers were at the inn. He even might have had so tender a regard for his own skin as to go back again. God grant that that were so! He even might not have meant to come at all. The landlord prayed with all his soul that Diggory Fargus and his men might not appear. The loss of the King was effaced for the time being from his mind by this new matter.

The security of his own person was involved in it, and the immunity of that sacred thing was of even greater moment to Gamaliel than the loss of a King’s ransom. All his life he had had a holy dread of violence. God in heaven be merciful to him a sinner, and keep away that ruthless sailor!

The landlord looked at the clock again. Five minutes to ten. Diggory Fargus was already twenty-five minutes behind his time. But there was hardly any comfort in the thought. Hours must elapse ere Captain Culpeper could come to his aid, unless by a miracle the King were retaken immediately. A little bitterly the landlord reflected that miracles did not happen to him. Was not his life stern, terrible, inexorable matter of fact? At least, it seemed so then.

The landlord fell once again to his principal occupation of that tragic day. He began to hobble up and down the kitchen, with ever and anon an anxious eye for the clock.

There might be hours of this form of torture. If there were, Gamaliel felt that surely he must go out of his mind. It was a suspense to which there would be no end. There was no limit to the hour at which Captain Culpeper might return to claim the two persons left in his custody. It might be an hour, or it might be twelve; it might be a day, a week, or a month. But be that as it may, his instructions were perfectly clear. He must detain those two guilty persons at his inn, by force, if necessary, or he would forfeit his life.

The first stroke of ten had barely struck, when the landlord caught a sound that froze the blood in his veins. The noise of persons on foot coming down the bridle-path rose above the distant roar of the sea. He heard rough voices. The kitchen door was tried; a lusty smack was delivered upon it.

“Open the door, mate!” cried the great voice of Diggory Fargus.

The landlord did not stir. He leant against the wall for support; he had not the strength of a mouse.

“Open the door, mate, d’ye hear me?” demanded Diggory Fargus.

A terrific blow shook the lusty oak. Still the landlord leant sickly against the wall.

The lady appeared at the head of the stairs, cloaked, masked, and gloved for a journey. Hearing that her deliverers were at hand, she ran down the stairs, and, not heeding the helpless landlord, thrust back the bolts, the chain, and the lock of the kitchen door.

The mariner and three companions as rude and ill-favoured as himself stepped out of the night.

“We’re behind our time, ma’am,” said Diggory Fargus; “but, d’ye see, at half-past nine we had to tack and go about, for the place was full of soldiers. We supposed they had come to take ye, but we thought it our dooty to return and satisfy ourselves.”

“God requite you, sailor,” said the woman, fervently. “My husband is still upstairs. But let us make all haste, for at any moment his enemies may return upon him.”

Even as the woman spoke, the pale figure of a man tottered down the stairs. Clinging tightly to the rail, he put one weak limb before the other and reached the kitchen before they had observed him. He too was fully accomplished for the journey.

“Oh, mine own,” said the woman, tenderly, “what a foolish valour! ’Tis ever the same headstrong, wilful, heedless fellow. Did I not order you to stay upstairs until we fetched you? Thou art much too weak to use thine own legs as yet, lad.”

“Peace, Patsy woman,” said the young man. “If I can walk into this accursed place, I can walk out of it. I am hale and strong by comparison with what I was when I came here with the bullet in my side. Landlord, give me a cup of wine, and I shall be fit to encounter the perils of the sea. Deuce take me! what hath happened to the landlord?”

As pale as linen, his eyes staring and his knees knocking, the landlord still clung in silence to the wall. Diggory Fargus looked at him grimly. Lying in concealment close at hand when the soldiers rode away, he had overheard the injunctions of Captain Culpeper.

“The Cap’n left particular orders,” said the mariner to the lady, “that this ’ere son of a rum puncheon was to hold you and your mate, ma’am, against his return, by force, if necessary. And as it goes agen his principles to use violence o’ any sort, he’s asking of himself, d’ye see, whether ye would take it amiss if he invited you to tarry.”

The woman looked at the landlord. None had had a fairer opportunity of judging his character than she during her sojourn in that place. Her eyes shone through her mask; the stern lines fell about her mouth; and then she turned away from him with the same tremor of disgust as one turns away from a venomous reptile. Even to her compassion there was a limit.

“Come, my own,” she said. “It is folly in us to lose a precious moment. I wonder what hath happened to the poor King. God be with him, poor lad, this night!”

“He should make good his escape,” said Lord Farnham. “He hath a horse and a full ten minutes start of his foes.”

Leaning on the arm of his wife he passed slowly out of the door, into the night and his freedom. The landlord still leant against the wall: not a word did he speak; not a finger did he lift to stay the departing guests.

Diggory Fargus tarried behind an instant to speak a word in the landlord’s ear.

“Mate,” said he, thrusting his one eye into the quivering face of the landlord, “I said, if ye played me false I would twist your head off your body with these two hands. But I shall leave it to others, d’ye see. I shall kind o’ leave it to my deppities. They’ll make a cleaner job of it than me. They’ll do it more formal and more lawyerlike. Besides, I have hardly the time to do it now. But let me tell ye, mate, as one man to another, that when next I am around this coast, I shall make a call at this old grog shop, and if I find that them there soldiers has not done their dooty by you, ye can lay to it as Diggory Fargus is a christened man he’ll keep his word. A pleasant evenin’ to you, mate.”

The sailor spat vehemently upon the kitchen floor, and lurched out into the darkness in the wake of his companions.

CHAPTER
XVII

_The Landlord_]

Gamaliel closed the door upon the last of his visitors. Gradually their slow footsteps receded into the roar of the sea. He listened, and fancied he could hear them long after he had ceased to do so. Insensibly his mind lingered on their sound, for when they should die away he knew that his life was at an end.

As one who has suffered the tortures and paroxysms of a disease may lose his agonies as soon as it develops mortal symptoms, so the landlord, possessed with the knowledge that his own life was the price he must pay for his weakness, sat down in his chair by the fire with a clear mind. There was no longer any need for him to torment himself. He foresaw the issue as plainly as the man in the cart when he looks upon the scaffold.

He had lost all. Events had been too great for his second-rate character. They had called for a strong man--a man of courage, of indomitable spirit and tenacity of purpose--to grapple with them. For such a one there had been a fortune. The landlord, self-deceived because all his life he had never been put to the test, had attempted to bend them to his own purposes. But they had proved too great and unwieldy; he had not had the physical strength to overcome them. Instead they had overcome him.

The landlord did not give himself up to despair. He was too far gone for that. He was bitterly afraid of death. A death by violence would still have the power to revolt him; but the thing uppermost in his mind was his humiliation. It was so fierce and overpowering, that it became an anodyne to lull and allay all the passions of his soul. It took the sting out of death itself. He had been tried and found wanting. At the age of sixty the supreme moment of a laborious and fairly successful life had come. He had failed; let him perish.

“Finis” was about to be written to his history. He had no longer to fear that awful suspense which had the power to overthrow the firmest intelligence. As plainly as he could hear the roar of the sea, he saw his doom. He sat still and thought upon it, almost calmly. Right at the very last he had emerged from the furnace, and had come out strong.

He would bare his neck, and they should do their worst. He would welcome it. He had no desire to live now; he had ceased to be swayed by his animal passions. All his life, when he could escape a moment from his greed and his sensuality, he had been a philosopher. He had warmed both hands at the fire of his own egotism. He had flattered himself that he had known his own strength and his own weakness. He knew nothing of the sort. Just as in one direction he had overestimated his resolution, he was now to prove that he had underestimated it in another.

A day ago he would probably have writhed on the ground in a fit had he been confronted by a death by violence. By now, however, he had got beyond all that. There were things a man occasionally had to submit to, which made such a thing almost a luxury. He had spent that day upon the rack. The sharp rending asunder of his body and his soul would be a merciful release. His eyeballs would no longer start from their sockets; his limbs would no longer crack; nor would his blood burst through the walls of his arteries. His shuddering frame would be at peace.

The clock struck twelve. The landlord clenched his hands as he sat in his chair; a smile crept stealthily upon the dead white of his cheeks. It was the last touch of irony that he, Gamaliel Hooker, should be sitting there so calmly looking a death by violence full in the face. To think that his old pampered flesh, cossetted and cushioned for sixty winters, should accept it without a murmur! The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb: Nature has her marvellous compensations; she takes the grossness from the animal spirit, that it may be insensible to the throes of death.

About one o’clock of the wintry morning the landlord rose from his chair, and had recourse to paper, a pen, and ink. He solemnly made his will. For the keeper of a sea tavern on a lonely coast, the home of the pirate and the smuggler, he had done excellently well in trade. He had added thrift to a natural aptitude. His money had not all been come by honestly, as the world interpreted that word. But that did not irk the landlord. All his life he had never pretended to a conscience. To him it was the hallmark of a superficial mind. And now in his last extremity he would not pretend to one. It was to be the great triumph of his life, that in his last hour he should prove to be stronger than he had ever judged himself to be. He would yield up his life calmly, without a snuffle, a whine, or a prayer.

About two o’clock he had signed his name with controlled fingers to this document. He sanded it carefully and put it by. He had hardly done so, when he jumped up suddenly from his chair. An old stab returned upon him; he felt a twinge of the old agony. After all, there was a chance of life. Suppose the pursuing soldiers retook the King! They would be then in a mood to overlook all, and they might permit him to live! The landlord cursed himself for the thought. God! was he going to be tortured again before he was allowed to perish? No, it was only the last twinge of an expiring nerve. The pain passed almost in an instant. He need not be afraid.

Towards three, the old man grew very cold. He had forgotten to replenish the fire. It had gone out hours ago, leaving the ashes grey. He was getting tired; the soldiers were a long time coming; he would try to go to sleep. Soon a pleasant lassitude stole upon his weariness. He had never been so exquisitely tired in his life before. It had been a heavy day; he had taken a lot out of himself; he deserved a rest. He fell asleep.

A little after four o’clock he awoke suddenly out of a dreamless slumber, as one startled. He lifted up his ears and listened. Horses! He rubbed his eyes in bewilderment. Why should he be sleeping there, and why should these signs invade the middle of the night? Ah yes, to be sure, he remembered! The soldiers were coming back.

His first thought was, had they caught the King? He banished it instantly. He had got past all that before he went to sleep. He would not go back, otherwise the last twenty-four hours had been lived in vain. He listened calmly for their near approach, but he still kept his chair by the side of the dead embers. There was no need for him to rise to let them in, as he remembered that he had not considered it necessary to secure the door before he went to sleep. What a transcendent thing it was to have a heart utterly without bodily fear! It was rather hard, though, that he should only be allowed to experience that pleasure for so short a period in his long life. However, it was very excellent even to have known it at all. He could hardly be said to have lived in vain.

The landlord, still in his chair by the dead fire, watched the kitchen door. He saw it open. He saw Captain Culpeper appear, stiff and cold with riding, and very morose. His men, stiff and cold and morose too, crowded in behind him. The landlord neither moved nor spoke; he seemed wholly indifferent to their entrance.

“The King is escaped!” said Captain Culpeper, eyeing him savagely.

“I knew it,” said the landlord, a little wearily. He closed his eyes; almost a smile came upon his white lips.

“Oh, you knew it!” said Captain Culpeper, with a grim satisfaction. “You knew it, did you! And how did you know it, fool and poltroon as you are?”

“Poltroon I am,” said the landlord, “a thousand times a poltroon; but I am no fool. I knew it because I knew it.”

“Bah!” said the soldier, “I have not the patience to talk with you. But I trust the man and the woman are still upstairs in their chamber.”

“They are not,” said the landlord; there was a note of triumph in his voice. “A company of smugglers bore them away half an hour after your departure.”

“And you allowed them to leave your inn, after what I had said to you?” said Culpeper, striving to control the fury that was shaking him from head to foot.

“I could not help myself,” said the landlord, indifferently.

“And you could not help the King’s going, I suppose,” said the soldier, “even when he went past your very nose?”

“No, I could not help myself,” said the landlord again.

“And wherefore could you not?”

The soldier’s rage was giving place now to a self-contained harshness which did not distress the landlord to observe.

“I do not know why I could not stay the King’s going,” said the landlord.

“What do you mean?” said the soldier.

“When the King went,” said the landlord, “I was not the master of myself; but, thank God, I am master of myself now.”

“You will soon cease to be,” said the soldier, regarding him with a grim surprise.

“That is as maybe,” said the landlord.

The soldiers crowded about the landlord with sinister intention upon their faces. Captain Culpeper briefly told two of them to procure a rope.

“You will find plenty in the stable,” said the landlord.

Several of the soldiers chuckled.

“Do you know for what purpose we require it, good Master Innkeeper?” said Culpeper, laughingly.

“The signboard will suit your purpose best,” said the landlord.

“You oblige us vastly,” said the soldier.

The landlord astonished them vastly too. They had not looked for this demeanour in one who was about to undergo the penalty of death. They had never encountered such an indifference in the face of it before.

However, when the two men returned bearing a stout piece of hemp, an evidence was furnished of the price at which the landlord’s newly-acquired fortitude had been purchased. When his bloodshot eyes fell on the rope, a cord appeared to snap in the middle of his brain; his head revolved slowly on his neck; and he pitched heavily on to the kitchen floor.

They turned him over on his back, but all attempts to restore the landlord to sensibility failed. After a while he appeared to grow dimly conscious of his surroundings; but he was bereft of speech, and he had not the power to move. It mattered not what remedies they had recourse to, the horrible, convulsed white face still had the vacancy and the inanimation of death without the repose of it.

“’Tis a pity we could not hang the old rogue more prettily,” said Captain Culpeper, when all their exertions had failed of their effect. “For if ever a man did merit a hanging, here he lies. He hath played a double game all through. But what he could have hoped to gain by it, for the life of me I cannot see. He must have been a sanguine fellow to think that he could run with the hare, and hunt with the dogs. He must have known that he went in danger of being torn to pieces. But why he should first betray the King, and then promote his escape, passes me completely. A queer old rogue, this landlord. Now then, lift him up, lads, and set him in the place he himself did choose.”

They placed the noose around the landlord’s neck and bore him out into the shrewd air of the morning. It was still as dark as pitch; never a star looked out of the sky; mercifully the moon had hidden her face; and thus the body of the landlord was unregarded, as it swung in the wintry darkness from the signboard of the “Sea Rover.”

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.