CHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIIIThe Soldiers
CHAPTER XIII
WHEN the landlord had carefully and thankfully seen the sailor out of his house, he looked at the clock as one hardly daring to do so. It was still twenty minutes past seven. The landlord recoiled from it with a shock. He was in that state of tension which rejects the simple and natural. He was either dreaming a wild dream, or he wasface to face with the supernatural. In his present extreme condition, both seemed possible.
All at once it then occurred to Gamaliel that the clock had stopped. Whatever had come upon him? Of course it was Friday evening, and for the first time in forty years the hour for winding it up had gone by unheeded. Almost savagely, so moved by a contemptuous anger was the landlord against himself, he took the key in his feverish hands, and strove to wind it up and set it again in motion. His attempts were pitiful. The key refused to obey his faltering hand, and wandered all over the face of the clock. The palsy of terror was already communicated to his limbs.
The clock was wound at last. He set the pendulum again in motion, and it recommenced sonorously to tick. Even then, however, the landlord was no nearer the end of his suspense. He did not know how long the clock had stopped, and in all the house it was the only thing he had to tell the time by. Could anything have been more distracting or inopportune than his forgetfulness?
By hook or by crook he must obtain the time. To be ignorant of it at that hour was more than flesh and blood could endure. He would go upstairs and ask the King.
In the greatest trepidation of body and spirit, he climbed the stairs. When he got to the top he stood irresolutely, with his knuckles poised against the chamber door. He felt that, even supposing the power was vouchsafed him to knock upon the panels, he would still be unable to address the King. His mouth was like a lime pit; his tongue stuck in it, no longer susceptible of control.
He was physically incapable of addressing the King. He would try to ask Lady Farnham. He knocked fiercely upon the door, for to do so with the deliberation of cold blood was impossible. He was bidden to enter.
The landlord did not know how he got into the chamber. He was certainly not conscious that it was by the agency of his feet. But suddenly he found himself staring wide-mouthed at his guests, with never a word to give them. They plainly expected one, yet his tonguestuck in his mouth; he was unable to utter a syllable.
“Hath our Boniface seen a ghost?” said the King’s voice. “I declare he hath the pallor and inanimation of death without the peace of it. Speak, good fellow. What ails thee?”
The landlord quivered from head to foot, but speak he could not. The King’s voice was the last straw. He tottered back against the wall.
“Oh, what doth ail the poor man?” said the compassionate lady. “Look how his eyes stare, and see how the sweat pours from him! And he can scarce stand upon his legs. I am sure it is some grievous malady. Can it be poison, thinkest thou?”
“Speak, good landlord,” said the King. “What doth ail thee?”
The King’s voice was utterly too much for the landlord. His struggles to speak ended in his shaking a few harsh sobs out of his dry throat. He then began to whimper like a child.
His three auditors stared at him with looks of genuine pity and alarm.
“I declare,” said the King, “I never saw anybody so overcome before. Something must be done for the poor fellow. I think we had better summon his son.”
The mention of his son’s name acted on the landlord in much the same manner as a spark upon a keg of gunpowder. The process of cause and effect was far too swift to be at all related in the unhappy Gamaliel’s subsequent consciousness; but almost before he recalled upon what errand his son had gone, his tongue was released, and words flowed from it in a torrent.
“The soldiers! the soldiers!” he cried. “The soldiers are coming, your Majesty!”
The landlord knew so little of what he was saying, that he was half stunned to find his three auditors looking at him so wildly.
“What is this you say, landlord?” said the King.
In the circumstances, the King’s voice struck with such a peculiar languor upon Gamaliel’s ear, that it acted like a sedative upon his nerves. There never was a better illustration of theforce of example upon a weak mind. Had the King and his companions ranted and raved, and called for their cloaks and their horses, the landlord would inevitably have fallen upon his knees and craved forgiveness of them. Yet, startled as they were, since they still retained the composure of good breeding, and the young King, probably with some little bravado, heightened his natural diffidence because his own safety was involved, the landlord was acted upon powerfully by their demeanour. Their composure did much to soothe his agitation.
In any case, had they but known it, he was entirely at their mercy; to be swayed by them, at that instant, backwards and forwards like a reed in the wind. They chose to go backwards; involuntarily the landlord, with no longer the least control over his faculties, went backwards too.
“What is this you say, landlord?” asked the calm voice of the King.
“I—I think the soldiers are coming, your Majesty,” said the trembling landlord.
“You think they are coming,” said the King. “Why should you think they are coming, landlord?”
There was the least tinge of amusement now added to the languor of the King’s tone. He pushed the traditional demeanour of a monarch, which had been in his family for generations, a point too far. Unconsciously, he was sealing his own fate by the unnatural tranquillity of his bearing. Slowly but surely his example was inciting the irresolute landlord to a better possession of himself.
“I—I thought I heard the sound of horses upon the road a minute since, as I sat by my kitchen fire,” said the landlord.
The frenzy was past. Gamaliel Hooker was beginning to speak again in his natural person. He was gradually becoming once more the master of his own mind.
Lady Farnham ran to the window. She pressed her ear upon it. Not a sound fell within the chamber; but all breathed heavily in an agony of listening. There was only thenever-ceasing voice of the breakers, beating against the wind and rocks.
“I only hear the roar of the sea,” said the lady, a minute afterwards.
“Plainly you were mistaken, landlord,” said the King, impassively. “But the great distress your fancies put you in was highly commendable to you. Your fears are groundless; but the new proofs they have furnished of your fidelity and good feeling towards us shall certainly not be forgotten. Landlord, we thank you.”
The landlord bent his white face. He had so much recovered himself, that as he backed out of the King’s presence he was able to say:
“What hour do you desire your supper, Sire?”
The King took out his watch and glanced at it.
“It is now ten minutes after eight of the clock,” he said to Lady Farnham. “Your friends are coming for my lord at half-past nine. I think it will be well, dear lady, if we all sup here together in this chamber at nineo’clock. We shall require a good meal, methinks; for many arduous passages may be before us all.”
“At nine o’clock then, Sire,” said the landlord, “it shall be laid in this chamber for three persons.”
The landlord closed the door and got himself below. His first action was to regulate the clock. Ten minutes past eight: the hour was at hand. The landlord stood in the middle of the kitchen listening; there was still only the sound of the sea. Then he heard the cry of a wild bird in the wintry night. But still the noise of horses came not.
Now that the frenzy of his madness was past, the landlord, in the reaction of it, felt that he had better control of himself. It was probably because his senses were numbed a little; the paralysis that had fallen upon them that morning when the King had first revealed his presence was coming upon them again. He was conscious of the same strange stupor creeping through his veins; but this time it was horrible. There was the nausea of the impendingto embitter it. The sensation it induced was not unlike that favourite form of nightmare of falling slowly down into space from some dizzy incredible height. He seemed to have been cut adrift from all that bound him to existence; he was being precipitated slowly, feet foremost, into the black gulf of the infinite yawning beneath him.
How slowly! The clock in the corner said twenty minutes past eight. The soldiers were already overdue; the landlord mechanically cursed them for not coming promptly. They could not know what tortures he had passed through during the last two hours, else they would never prolong them and draw them out. If they did not arrive soon to put him out of his misery, he was sure that another frenzy would come upon him. How sick, how weak, how impotent he felt now that he could dimly recall the recent scene before the King! There are times when a thing that has happened many a year ago—some smallfaux pasor other—will recur to the mind with a dim sense of bashful shame. At first the landlord was afflicted inabout the same degree; but as the minutes passed, it grew vastly stronger and more vivid, until in the end it became a whirling vertigo of self-disgust. The landlord loathed himself.
A coward, when he knows he is a coward, and would be otherwise, is not far removed from the most unfortunate man in the world. The landlord had lived sixty years before he had discovered how ignoble were the parts that composed the fabric of his character. For the first time they were confronted by a set of circumstances that would have taxed the resolution of the strongest mind to the utmost. The landlord had awakened—for he was a man cursed with a considerable degree of intelligence—to the fact that the materials out of which his mind was made were miserably inadequate to the present occasion. Something beyond self-love, greed, cunning, and an implacable egotism were demanded of him who aspired to act the leading part in the drama about to be played. He had sold his King, it was true; but his critical spirit told him how terribly he had bungled the tragic business.
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 theblood, 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 themoment 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.