The King's Highway

by G. P. R. James

"She knows me, too," replied Green, drily; "and I will join you there in ten minutes with any intelligence I may gain."

Green left him at once, with that peculiar sharpness and rapidity of movement which Wilton had always remarked in him from their first meeting. The young gentleman, on his part, went over to the house of the Earl of Sunbury, and telling the old housekeeper, and the girl who opened the door to him, that a gentleman would soon be there to speak with him on business, he went up to the saloon, and as soon as he was alone, raised the light that was left with him, to gaze upon the picture which we have mentioned more than once, and to compare it by the aid of memory with the lady whom he had seen but a few days before. The likeness was very strong, the height was the same, the features, examined strictly one by one, presented exactly the same lines. The complexion, indeed, in the picture, was more brilliant; and it was that, perhaps, as well as a certain roundness, which marked a difference of age; but then the expression was precisely the same—a depth, a tenderness even approaching to melancholy—in the picture, as in her whom he had seen; and though he gazed, and wondered, and wearied imagination for probabilities, he found none, but could only end by believing that, in the facts connected with that picture, lay the mystery of his fate, and of the link between him and the Earl of Sunbury.

He was still gazing, when Green was ushered into the room, and setting down the light, Wilton turned to meet him. There was a dark and heavy frown upon the countenance of him whom we have so often heard called the Colonel, as he entered: an expression of bitterness mingled with sadness; but, nevertheless, he took up the light, and walking up to the picture, gazed upon it for a minute or two, as Wilton had done.

"It is wonderfully like," he said, after pausing for a moment or two—"how beautiful she was! However, I have no time to think of such things now. I have here tidings for you, Wilton. I know not yet rightly what they are, for I caught but a glance of them; and had other things to think of bitter enough, and requiring instant attention. Here, let us look what this epistle says."

Setting down the lamp upon the table, he opened the letter and held it to the light, reading it attentively, while Wilton, who stood beside him did the same. It was written in fine small hand, and in French; but the page at which Green had opened the sheet, after a few words connected with a sentence that had gone before, went on as follows:—"I should not have sent this till we were safe across, but that circumstances have induced us to delay our departure; and you would scarcely think that it is I who have urged Caroline to remain for yet a little while: I, who some days ago was so fearful of remaining, so anxious to depart. Nor is it solely an inclination to linger near that dear boy, although I own the sight of him has been to me like the foretaste of a new existence. Bless him for me, my friend—bless him for me! But I found that the dear wild girl who is with me had neither ceased to love, nor ceased entirely to hope. In the last letter she received, mingled with reproaches for coming hither, there was every now and then a burst of tenderness and affection which made her trust, and me almost believe, that all good and honourable feeling is not extinct. She thinks that if she could see him, the better angel might gain the dominion, and I have not only counselled her to remain yet a little while, but also even to go to London should it be required. While we were talking over all these things," the letter proceeded, "just after you were gone, we heard a fresh arrival at this house, and, as I thought, a woman's voice speaking in tones of remonstrance and complaint. I have this morning learned who it is, and now write in great haste to ask you if these things are right in any cause, or if you can have anything to do with it. I will not believe it, Lennard—I will not believe it. Rash as you have been in choosing your own fate—hasty as you have been in all things connected with yourself—you would not, I am sure, countenance a thing that is cruel as well as criminal."

Green laughed bitterly. "I am forced," he said, "to bear much that I would not countenance. But look here—she goes on to say that it is the daughter of the Duke. 'Young, and beautiful, and gentle,' she says—that matches well, does it not, Wilton, ha?—I who has been torn from her father, the Duke of Gaveston, in this daring and shameful manner, and brought hither by water with the intention, as I believe, of sending her over to France in the ship that we have hired. I have seen her twice, and spoken with her for some time, and I beseech you, if it be possible, find means of setting her free.'—Ay, but how may that be?" continued Green. "If they have got her, and risk their necks to have her, they will take care to keep her sure. They have men enough for that purpose, and they have taken care to render me nearly powerless."

"I should have thought," replied Wilton, whose joy at the discovery of where Laura really was had instantly blown up the flame of hope so brightly, that objects distant and difficult to be reached seemed by that light to be close at hand—"I should have thought, from what I have seen and what I suspect, that you could have commanded a sufficient force at any moment to set all opposition at defiance, especially when you were engaged in a lawful and generous cause."

"I should have thought so, too," replied Green, "two days ago. But times have changed, Wilton, times have changed, and, like the wind of a tropical climate, turned round in a single moment. On my soul," he continued, vehemently, "one would think that men were absolutely insane. Here a set of people, whose lives are all in my own hand, dare to tamper with my friends and comrades, to bribe them, to hire them away from me, ay, and to do it so openly that I cannot fail to see it, and that too, at the very moment when they know that I hate and abhor their proceedings, and when they have just reason to suppose that I will take means to frustrate their base and cowardly designs, and only waver between the propriety of doing so, and the wish not to give them over to the death they well deserve."

"If they have so acted," replied Wilton—"if they have shown such base ingratitude towards you, as well as designs dangerous to the country—for I will not affect to doubt or misunderstand you—why not boldly, and at once, give them up to justice? Understand me, I wish to hear nothing more of these men. I wish to be perfectly ignorant of their whole proceedings. I wish to have no information whatsoever, except my own suspicions, for if I had, I should feel myself bound immediately to cause their arrest. But from what you have said in regard to Sir John Fenwick; from what the Duke has said on various occasions; and from what I myself have remarked, I am strongly inclined to believe that there are matters going on which can but end in ruin to those engaged in them, if not in all the horrors of a civil war."

"That I should not mind—that I should not mind!" cried Green—"let us have a civil war; let every man lay his hand upon his sword and betake him to his standard. That is the true, the right, the only right way to get rid of an usurper. It has been with the very view of that civil war you talk of that I have banished myself from the station in which I was born, that I have walked by night instead of by day, and that I have kept in constant preparation, throughout the whole of the south of England, the seeds, as it were, of a future army. And now what have they done? Not only trusted the command of all things to others, but given that command to men who would do, by the basest and most dastardly means, that which I would do by open force and bold exertion: men who have mixed up crimes of the blackest die with the noblest aspirations that ever led on men of honour to the greatest deeds; who have soiled and sullied, disgraced and degraded, the cause for which I have shed my blood, ruined my fortune, and seen all the fair things of life pass away like a dream. By heavens, I could cry as if I were a girl or a baby," and he dashed away a tear from his eye which he could not restrain; "and now," he continued, "and now if I do not prevent them they will put a damning seal to all their follies and crimes, which will render that holy and noble cause horrible in the eyes of all men, which will brand it for ever with infamy and shame, and leave it blighted and loathsome, so that men will shrink from the very thought thereof."