“Do you realise what this man Braintree has done,” she cried indignantly. “He has dared us all. He has dared the King-at-Arms and the King.”
“Well,” replied Murrel in a detached manner, “I don’t quite see what the devil else he could do. If I were in his place–”
“But you’re not in his place,” she cried vehemently, “you’re not in the place of any rebel or rioter. Don’t you ever think, Douglas, that it is time you were in your own place.”
Murrel smiled rather wearily. “I admit,” he said, “that I happen to be able to see two sides of a question. And I suppose you’d say its done by walking round and round it.”
“I say,” she said rising in wrath, “that I never met a man who saw both sides of a question without wanting to clout him on both sides of the head.”
Presumably lest she should yield to this impulse, she departed in a storm, and swept up the long lawns and terraces towards the old raised garden in which the play of Blondel the Troubadour had once been performed. And the coincidence came back to her with something of a pang of memory; for in that green deserted theatre stood one green deserted figure in forester’s costume, with a mane of light hair and a lifted leonine head, looking across the valley towards the smoking town.
For a moment she stood as if caught in a mesh of memories merely elfin and fantastic; as if she had loved and lost something unreal; the music and emotion of the theatricals revisited her and lulled her lust for action; but in a moment she had brushed it away like a cobweb and spoke in her own firm voice.
“You know your revolutionists have sent their reply. I hear they will not come to the Court.”
He looked round slowly in his rather short-sighted fashion; only the pause before he spoke expressed the change in his feelings on hearing the voice that hailed him.
“Yes, I have received their message,” he said mildly. “It was addressed to me. They certainly state their position clearly; but they will come to the Court all right.”
“They will come!” she repeated in some excitement. “Do you mean that Braintree has yielded?”
“They will come, yes,” he repeated, nodding. “Braintree has not yielded; indeed I did not expect him to do so. To tell the truth, I rather respect him for not doing so. He is a very courageous and consistent man; and it is always so much pleasanter to have an opponent of that kind.”
“But I don’t understand,” she cried. “What do you mean by saying they won’t yield but they will come?”
“The new constitution,” he explained, “provides for the situation, as I suppose most constitutions do. It’s rather like what we used to call a subpoena. I don’t know how many men I shall want with me; but I suppose some of the Hundreds may have to turn out.”
“What!” she cried. “You don’t mean that you are going to fetch them to the Court!”
“Oh yes, the law is quite clear on that point,” he answered. “And as the law makes me the executive officer, I have really no will in the matter.”
“You seem to have more will than anybody else I’ve come across yet,” she said. “You should hear Monkey!”
“Of course,” he said in his pedantic way, “what I state is a purpose and not a prediction. I cannot answer for what anyone else will do or will succeed in doing. But they will come here or I shall not come.”
His meticulous phraseology suddenly thrilled through her thoughts as she understood what he meant.
“You mean there will be fighting,” she said.
“There certainly will be on our side if there is on theirs,” he answered.
“You are the only man in this house,” cried Rosamund and found herself suddenly trembling from head to foot.
It seemed as if his stiff attitude was staggered so that he lost control of himself quite unexpectedly. He uttered a sort of cry.
“You must not say that to me; I am weak; and weakest of all now, when I should try to be strong.”
“You are not weak at all,” she said, recovering her firm voice.
“I am mad,” he said. “I love you.”
She was dumb. He caught both her hands and his arms thrilled up to the shoulders as with an electric shock.
“What am I doing and saying?” he cried harshly. “I–to you to whom so many men must have said it. What will you say?”
She remained leaning forward and looking steadily into his face.
“I say what I said,” she answered. “You are the only man.”
“Your eyes blind me,” he said.
They spoke no more; but the great land about them and above spoke for them as it rose in the mighty terraces towards the colossal corner-stones of the mountains; and the great wind of West England that rocked the tops of its royal trees; and all that vast valley of Avalon that has seen the muster of heroes and the meeting of immortal lovers, was full of a movement as of the trampling horses and the trumpets, when the kings go forth to battle and queens rule in their stead.
So they stood for a moment on the top of the world and in the highest place of our human fortune, almost at the moment when Olive and John Braintree in the dark and smoky town were taking their sad farewell. And no man could have guessed that the sad farewell was soon to be followed with fuller reconciliation and understanding; but that over the two coloured and shining figures, on the shoulder of the golden down, hung a dark cloud of sundering and division and doom.
CHAPTER XVI
THE JUDGMENT OF THE KING
Lord Seawood and Lord Eden were seated in their favourite summer-house on the lawn, the same into which the arrow had once entered like the first shaft of a new sunrise; and to judge by their faces they were doubtful whether the sun were not in eclipse. Lord Eden’s rigidity of expression might indeed have many meanings; but old Seawood was shaking his head in an openly disconsolate manner.
“If they had availed themselves of my intervention,” he said. “I could I think have made clear the impossibility of their position; a position quite unparalleled in the whole of my public life. The restoration of our fine old historical forms must have the profound sympathy of every cultivated man; but it is against all precedent that they should use these forms for the practical suppression of material menace. What would Peel have said, had it been proposed to use only the antiquated halberds of a few Beefeaters in the Tower instead of the excellent and effective Constabulary which he had the genius and imagination to conceive? What would Palmerston have said, had anyone suggested to him that the Mace lying on the table of Parliament could be used as a club with which to quell a riot in Parliament Square? Impossible as it is for us to project upon the future the actions of the mighty dead of the past, I conceive it as likely that he would have made it the subject of a jest. But men in the present generation are devoid of humour.”
“Our friend the King-at-Arms is devoid of humour all right,” drawled Eden. “I sometimes wonder whether he is not the happier for it.”
“There,” said the other nobleman with firmness. “I cannot agree. Our English humour, such as that to be found in the best pages of Punch is–.”
At this moment a footman appeared silently and abruptly in the entrance of the hut, murmured some ritual words and handed a note to his master. The reading of it changed his master’s dolorous expression to one of unaffected astonishment.
“God bless my soul,” said Lord Seawood; and remained gazing at the paper in his hand.
For upon that paper was scrawled in a large and bold hand a message destined in the next few days to change the whole face of England; as nothing for centuries had ever been changed by a battle upon English soil.
“Either our young friend is really suffering from delusions,” he said at last, “or else–”