The Roman Catholic women were with them. To enter the oratory would in those circumstances have been a surrender of principle, but none the less did Anne pray with fervent passion in her chamber for pity for the child, and comfort for his parents. At last there was a stir, and hurrying out to the great stair, Anne saw a man in plain clothes replying in an Irish accent to the King, who was supporting the Queen with his arm. Happily the escort had missed the Prince of Wales. They had been obliged to turn back to London without meeting him, and from that danger he had been saved.
A burst of tears and a cry of fervent thanksgiving relieved the Queen’s heart, and James gave eager thanks instead of the reprimand the colonel had expected for his blundering.
A little later, another messenger brought word that Lord and Lady Powys had halted at Guildford with their charge. A French gentleman, Monsieur de St. Victor, was understood to have undertaken to bring him to London—understood—for everything was whispered rather than told among the panic-stricken women. No one who knew the expectation could go to bed that night except that the King and Queen had—in order to disarm suspicion—to go through the accustomed ceremonies of the coucher. The ladies sat or lay on their beds intently listening, as hour after hour chimed from the clocks.
At last, at about three in the morning, the challenge of the sentinels was heard from point to point. Every one started up, and hurried almost pell-mell towards the postern door. The King and Queen were both descending a stair leading from the King’s dressing-room, and as the door was cautiously opened, it admitted a figure in a fur cloak, which he unfolded, and displayed the sleeping face of the infant well wrapped from the December cold.
With rapture the Queen gathered him into her arms, and the father kissed him with a vehemence that made him awake and cry. St. Victor had thought it safer that his other attendants should come in by degrees in the morning, and thus Miss Woodford was the only actually effective nursery attendant at hand. His food was waiting by the fire in his own sleeping chamber, and thither he was carried. There the Queen held him on her lap, while Anne fed him, and he smiled at her and held out his arms.
The King came, and making a sign to Anne not to move, stood watching.
Presently he said, “She has kept one secret, we may trust her with another.”
“Oh, not yet, not yet,” implored the Queen. “Now I have both my treasures again, let me rest in peace upon them for a little while.”
The King turned away with eyes full of tears while Anne was lulling the child to sleep. She wondered, but durst not ask the Queen, where was the tiler’s wife; but later she learnt from Miss Dunord, that the woman had been so terrified by the cries of the multitude against the ‘pretender,’ and still more at the sight of the sea, that she had gone into transports of fright, implored to go home, and perhaps half wilfully, become useless, so that the weaning already commenced had to be expedited, and the fretfulness of the poor child had been one of the troubles for some days. However, he seemed on his return to have forgotten his troubles, and Anne had him in her arms nearly all the next day.
It was not till late in the evening that Anne knew what the King had meant. Then, while she was walking up and down the room, amusing the little Prince with showing by turns the window and his face in a large mirror, the Queen came in, evidently fresh from weeping, and holding out her arms for him, said, after looking to see that there was no other audience—