J. C. Snaith

“ Will Jackson was already submitting to another interrogatory from his master, when she came whitely and wearily down the stairs. The cunning landlord had contrived that their meeting should be in his presence. They should have no chance to pre-arrange an ignorance of one another. He now observed their demeanour with a devilish intentness, and he could swear he saw a sudden swift flush dart across the woman’s face and a hunted, hungry look of fear spring in her eyes the moment her gaze alighted on Will Jackson.
As for that clod-like servitor, he was just as imperturbable as ever. ”

“ It was a hard-won struggle; none harder. But at last, as the shadows of the wintry evening came stealing down the rocks, and Cicely lit the first candle, the struggle came to an end. Each individual nerve in Gamaliel’s body rioted within him; he was as unsubstantial as pulp; but at last his resolution was running clear and strong. The little flickering tremor that had a thousand times routed it and put it to shame was now dead. Hot rum-and-water had ultimately done its business. The crisis was past. He was master of himself after all. ”

“ Pray do not crawl like a worm, my good Boniface, an it chafes your belly. Stand upon your legs, good fellow; your appearance is become too beastly, now you writhe upon the ground. Your congees offend me, Boniface; they offend me. They are altogether too gross for a man of my nice instinct. But a truce to our pleasantries; my lord Farnham is in a highly serious mood. Landlord, do you go into your filthy stable, and rummage about in Will Jackson’s bed of straw. ”

“ Oh, ye’re a cunning one, Gamaliel, my son! Now, Master Charles [23] Stuart, King o’ Scotland, please to knock upon my door. I am sure your Highness will be more than welcome. There’s a cheerful hearth awaiting for you—ay, and a tun o’ liquor for your royal lips. I am sure, my liege, the good Gamaliel will entertain you as befits a prince. And, oh, Lord! to think the price o’ your blessed Majesty would buy that poor old man an annuity for the remainder of his days. And, prithee, bring your followers also, my liege—all in their nice new velvet breeches and point-lace frilly-dillies. ”

“ He slept no more. He lay with his eyes riveted on the King, who had his back towards him. He lay as weak and helpless as a child from the effects of his malady; but his hands were clenched on the coverlet, his white cheeks gleamed, his eyes blazed. He strove impotently to rise from his pillows, but fell back upon them gasping for breath.
The distinct sounds of his struggle were heard by the King. He desisted from his absorbing occupation, and turned round to discover their cause.
“Ha! Farnham,” he said, coolly, “so you are awake at last. ”

“ The god of circumstance was stronger than he.
The landlord tore his hands on the sharp [88] fragments that studded the face of the rocks; he tripped over others that lay concealed. He barked his shins, tore his clothes, bruised his body; but where the woman with the lantern went, he went to. In the teeth of the gale she won her way up to the pinnacle. The uncertain flame in the lantern blinked and tottered in her hand; but, like its bearer, it somehow prevailed intrepidly against the gale. Once more her eyes were for the sea ”

“ The landlord turned from her coldly.
“Will you have no pity for the agonies of a [104] mother?” she cried. “Will you not spare the father of the babe I bear?”
In the mad frenzy of her fear she suddenly rose to her feet, with all the blood quivering and sparkling now in her cheeks. The landlord admitted to himself, even as he tortured her, that there never was so perfectly noble, so perfectly magnificent a creature as this wretched lady. But when she flung back her cloak to lend the prayer of her motherhood an additional emphasis, he laughed in her face. ”

“ 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 landlord had trimmed his cruel words, and, uttered them slowly. Each one sank like a sharp-pointed knife into the very flesh of the woman. She shrank away from him, torn, bleeding, trembling.
“Happily,” said the landlord in the same clear-cut, long-drawn, formal tone, “Gamaliel Hooker is not a man to shirk his plain and manifest duty. A few hours prior to your appearance a band of soldiers called here, and told me where I might find them should any malignants appear. ”

“ A man who all his life long had first sought his own pecuniary advantage in any circumstance that might arise, did well to fear that his rapacity in any given case might get the better of his judgment.
As Gamaliel Hooker sat cossetting himself beside the fire, this mysterious young man of the mariner’s dwelt much in his mind. A proscribed cavalier, he would stake his leg. Diggory Fargus lay with his boat in the Cove, waiting to take him out of England over the sea. ”

“ 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 [243] 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. ”

“ Presently, with the King upstairs out of the way, and his generous potations to strengthen him and to calm his nerves, the landlord’s wits strayed back slowly, one at a time. To think that the King should come in the guise of a serving-man, and that he should be such a blind fool as not to recognise him when he came! ”

“ But I’m just going to sing a word in your ear. I’m a plain-dealing man, I am: rough, you’ll say, almighty rough; but I’m a man o’ my word, and you can lay to that. Now, if a young man comes to your lousy, rat-ridden old hulk of a tavern, and asks for Diggory Fargus, you just have the goodness to tell him he’ll find me showing a light from the boat, at twelve o’clock at midnight, a short sea-mile up the shore at Pyler’s Cove. You just tell him that. And if he should come, you are to keep him snug, d’ye see, here in this house till nightfall. He must not be seen by a living soul. ”

“ Of so vastly different a nature was [217] 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. ”

“ He could not grapple with them with the ease and deftness of a younger man, or a man endowed with stronger fibres in his character.
Do as he would, there was no sleep for him to-night. When he shut his eyes he saw the King with rime on his fine cloak, and rings on his fingers, and a feather in his hat, and a retinue of noble-looking gentlemen bowing low before him. When he opened them, the ugly visage of Diggory Fargus, that dreadful [82] mariner, was grinning at him from the foot of the four-poster. His image was quite as realistic as the King’s. ”

“ It distinctly seemed to the landlord’s eager ears that the woman had as great a solicitude for this fellow as her husband—nay, an even greater one. For was she not apparently prepared to sacrifice her lord, rather than Will Jackson should reveal the secret between them?
Gamaliel was cunning enough; but, after all, cunning is a quality with grievous limitations. It is the offspring of a mean mind, and is therefore of value only up to a particular point. ”

“ The landlord regarded him keenly. It seemed almost impossible that this rustic clod and the beautiful woman upstairs should have anything in common. But what of her behaviour on the rock during the night? Could it merely have been fright at his appearance? Hardly that: besides, his own behaviour had been very incongruous, considering what a bucolic clown of a fellow he was during the daytime. Yet was he such a clown after all? Had not the landlord first remarked about him that he appeared to have wits rather above his station? ”

“ It is hardly to be supposed that the wife of a proscribed cavalier, who hath come a fugitive to a lonely inn on the seacoast, in the hope of slipping over to France on a dark night, should be willing to publish his name to all and sundry. But it is a fortunate circumstance that old Gamaliel Hooker hath a few wits in his head, otherwise a notable traitor to his country might have escaped his deserts, and there would be one malignant more than there should be in the world. ”

“ In an instant the landlord, afraid as he was of this fellow, arrived at the conclusion that his presence in that house was not at all required. The sooner he was quit of him the better. The young man he sought might very possibly be upstairs; he might prove to be either my Lord Farnham or the King; but things were very well as they were. This Diggory Fargus could not improve them; he might very possibly undo them though.
“I have seen no young man,” said Gamaliel shortly. “And I don’t much want to see one. This is a peaceable and honest inn.” ”

“ There is no form of this disease so acute as that which springs from the sufferer’s knowledge of his own inferiority. The King was nobler, handsomer, more alluring to the eyes of a woman than he. His misfortunes and his station made him dreadful in the eyes of a jealous man. He hated the King, not so much for what he had done, as for what he had it in his power to do. ”

“ My poor young Lord Farnham lies there of a bullet wound, a memorial of the melancholy Third, and his adorable Countess is there to nurse him.”
“Ah, Sire!” said the Colonel, wagging a playful finger at the King. “Further argument of mine is superfluous, I fear. Mr. Pocock cannot hope to compete with my Lady Farnham. And, after all, Sire, I do not think it matters greatly where you lie this evening. The enemy do not seem to be very active in this neighbourhood. Landlord, you have no reason to fear their appearance to-night, I trow?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Mariner
JOSEPH once away on his errand, the landlord felt easier. He had no longer to fear his own irresolution. Things must take their course. Therefore, he sat down and waited through the weary hours, with a conviction steadily arising in his mind that after all he was playing a fine, a manly, not to say a noble, part. It calls [176] for no little courage to sell one’s king for a few pieces of money. Gamaliel, now he came to look back upon this transaction, or at least the inception of it, felt something perilously like pleasure glow within him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 impending [206] to embitter it. ”

“ My wretched limbs are as paper.”
“As implacable a foe as thou art a friend,” said the King. “It is, however, the only reparation we can make you.”
The unfortunate woman showed a veritable reluctance to do the behests of her lord. She looked at the King and she looked at the man in the bed with a terrified bewilderment. On the face of the one was the eternal frank smile of audacious indifference. The countenance of the other was entirely merged in his eyes. They blazed. The woman faltered; she trembled; she hung back. ”

“ They grated on the King’s ear. He looked up a little startled at the man in the bed, and then he smiled.
“The solicitude of our friends,” he said, “grows more and more remarkable. Never was a monarch encompassed by so much disinterestedness.”
The sneer was so slight as to be hardly perceptible, but poor Farnham felt ready to slay him for it. That young man, however, by his ill-timed interposition, had retarded rather than advanced the end he wished to attain. The King settled himself more snugly upon his chair. ”

“ The landlord was the better able to regard its occupant. He was half prepared to discover that the young man was the victim of no malady whatsoever. He would not be surprised to find him quite hale and hearty. Nay, so little faith had he in this young man’s condition, that should he prove to have left the chamber secretly already, and gone away in stealth, he was not likely to be astounded. It so befell, however, that the landlord had no grounds for his suspicions. For there confronting him the sufferer lay. By the mellow light of the candles he saw him prone in the bed, as ghastly as death. ”