"I bear you ever in my mind, and the time may come, will come, when I will beg you to hear more from me than I dare to say now, and grant me a very earnest petition."
"The time will come—the time will come, and, meanwhile, I can wait," she thought. "Yes, the time will come, and I can wait."
CHAPTER X.
THE FIFTH OF NOVEMBER.
There are exceptions to every rule, and this applies to cities as well as to individuals. The meek man may be excited to fierce anger, the quietest and most undemonstrative, may suddenly be moved to enthusiasm. So with Wells, that little city of peace, under the Mendips; had anyone visited it for the first time on the fifth of November, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and twenty-four, they must have been struck by the uproar and confusion which reigned in the usually quiet streets.
Although Mrs. Arundel had been warned by her courteous host, the Bishop, not to be alarmed if the sound of a tumultuous crowd should even reach the seclusion of the palace itself, neither he nor she were at all prepared for the hubbub and uproar, which, beginning before the sun was well above the horizon, lasted till midnight, and, indeed, into the early hours of the next day.
It was the Bishop's first year at Wells, and therefore his first experience of the great demonstration of the fifth of November in his cathedral town; and neither he nor his son had been at all aware that the only place of safety for the whole day, would be within the battlemented walls of the palace, outside of which the tumult and shouting gathered force hour by hour, till the supreme moment of the bull-baiting in the market-place arrived.
The bull-baiting was stopped in 1839, but the fifth of November was for many years later marked in Wells, by the most extravagant expressions of Protestant zeal. Enough gunpowder was let off in the market-place to blow up Bishop, Deans, and Canons! A huge bonfire was piled up in the market-square, saturated with tar, of which large barrels were rolled to the scene of the conflagration from time to time during the day, kindled at last as the final outburst of enthusiastic hatred, which the people of Wells thus showed of that ill-contrived plot, which was to have made an end with one fell swoop of the sagacious King James, and his parliament.
It always seemed a strange form for such zeal to take; for the law-abiding folk in the little city suffered greatly during the demonstration. The windows overlooking the market-place were boarded up at dusk, and all business suspended in the latter part of the day. The whole population seemed to be gathered in the market-square. Effigies of Guy Fawkes were paraded about the streets, accompanied by those of any persons, who had unhappily incurred public displeasure during the year; to be consigned to the flames with shouts and execrations as soon as the big bonfire was lighted.