CHAPTER IV
THE LANDING OF THE FRENCH
Then they had dinner. The children had to sit very straight and eat very slowly, and their glasses were filled with beer instead of water; and when they asked for water Lady Arden asked how many more times they would have to be told that water was unwholesome. Lord Arden was very quiet. At quite the beginning of dinner he had told his wife all about the wise woman, and the landing of the French, and the three signs, and she had said, “Law, save us, my lord; you don’t say so?” and gone on placidly cutting up her meat. But when the cloth had been drawn, and decanters of wine placed among the dishes of dried plums and preserved pears, Lord Arden brought down his fist on the table and said—
“Not more than three glasses for me to-day, my lady. I am not superstitious, as well you know; but facts are facts. What did you do with that white Mouldiwarp?”
Elfrida had put it in the bottom drawer of the tallboys in her room (cook had told her which room that was), and said so rather timidly.
“It’s my belief,” said Lady Arden, who seemed to see what was her husband’s belief and to make it her own—a very winning quality—“it’s my belief that it’s a direct warning; in return, perhaps, for the tea and sugar.”
“Ah!” said Lord Arden. “Well, whether or no, every man in this village shall be armed and paraded this day, or I’ll know the reason why. I’m not going to have the French stepping ashore as cool as cucumbers, without ‘With your leave,’ or ‘By your leave,’ and any one to say afterwards, ‘Well, Arden, you had fair warning, only you would know best.’”
“No,” said Lady Arden, “that would be unpleasant.”
Lord Arden’s decision was made stronger by the arrival of a man on a very hot horse.
“The French are coming,” he said, quite out of breath. But he could not say how he knew. “They all say so,” was all that could be got out of him, and “They told me to come tell you, my lord, and what’s us to do?”
We live so safely now; we have nothing to be afraid of. When we have wars they are not in our own country. The police look after burglars, and even thunder is attended to by lightning-rods. It is not easy for us to understand the frantic terror of those times, when, from day to day, every man, woman, and child trembled in its shoes for fear lest “the French should come”—the French, led by Boney. Boney, to us, is Napoleon Buonaparte, a little person in a cocked hat out of the history books. To those who lived in England when he was a man alive, he was “the Terror that walked by night,” making children afraid to go to bed, and causing strong men to sleep in their boots, with sword and pistol by the bed-head, within easy reach of the newly awakened hand.