It seemed natural to dress splendidly to thoughts touching so many royalties, and Jane looked with satisfaction at her toilet. It had progressed without much care, but the result was fitting and beautiful: a long gown of pale blue silk, with white lace sleeves and a lace tippet, and a string of pearls round her throat. Anything more would have been too much for Jane Swaffham, though when the Ladies Mary and Frances came to her, she could not help admiring their bows and bracelets and chains, their hair dressed with gemmed combs and their hands full of fresh flowers. She thought they looked like princesses, and they were overflowing with good-natured happiness.
Taking Jane by the hand, they led her from room to room, showing her what had been done and what had been added, and lingering specially in the magnificent suite which was all their own. It was very strange. Jane thought of the little chamber with the sloping roof in the house they occupied in Ely, and she wondered for a moment, if she was dreaming. On their way to the parlours they passed the door of a room Jane recollected entering on her previous visit, and she asked what changes had been made in it?
"None," said Mary with a touch of something like annoyance.
"None at all," reiterated Frances. "You know Charles Stuart tried to sleep in it, and he had dreadful dreams, and the night lamp was always put out, and he said the place was full of horror and suffering. It was haunted," the girl almost whispered. "My father said 'nonsense,' and he slept in it two nights, and then——"
"Father found it too cold," interrupted Mary impatiently. "He never said more than that. Listen! Some one is coming at full gallop—some two, I think," and she ran to the window and peered out into the night.
"It is the Protector," she said; "and I believe Admiral Blake is with him. Let us go down-stairs." And they took Jane's hands and went together down the great stair-way. Lovelier women had never trod the dark, splendid descent; and the soft wax-lights in the candelabra gave to their youthful beauty a strange, dreamlike sense of unreal life and movement. Mary and Frances were talking softly; Jane was thinking of that closed room with its evil-prophesying dreams, and its lights put out by unseen hands, and the mournful, superstitious King in his captivity fearing the place, and feeling in it as Brutus felt when his evil genius came to him in his tent and said, "I will meet thee again at Philippi." Then in a moment there flashed across her mind a woeful dream she had one night about Cluny. It had come to her in the height of her hope and happiness, and she had put it resolutely from her. Now she strove with all her soul to recollect it, but Frances would not be still, and the dream slipped back below the threshold. She could have cried. She had been on the point of saying, "Oh, do be quiet!" but the soul's illumination had been too short and too impalpable for her to grasp.
The next moment they were in a brilliantly lighted room. Mr. and Mrs. Claypole, and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Cromwell, and Doctor John Owen, and Mr. Milton, and Doctor Verity were grouped around her Highness the Protector's handsome wife. And she was taking their homage as naturally as she had been used to take attention in her simple home in Ely, being more troubled about the proper serving of dinner than about her own dignity. She sat at the Protector's right hand, and Jane Swaffham sat at his left.
"The great men must scatter themselves, Jane," he said; "my daughter Dorothy Cromwell wants to be near Mr. Milton, and Lady Claypole will have none but Doctor Owen, and one way or another, you will have to be content with my company," and he laid her hand under his hand, and smiled down into her face with a fatherly affection.
He was in an unusually happy mood, and Doctor Owen remarking it, Admiral Blake said, "They had been mobbed—mobbed by women—and the Protector had the best of it, and that was a thing to pleasure any man." Then Mrs. Cromwell laughed and said,
"Your Highness must tell us all now, or we shall be very discontented. Where were you, to meet a mob of women?"